Review by C.J. Bunce

The new Netflix movie Uglies lands similarly as The Hunger Games–The Hunger Games being a thin knock-off of The Running Man, and it turns out  Uglies is similarly as thin being a knock-off of Logan’s Run.  At the age of 16, young people in the future must go through a transformation that changes them to make them “pretty,” only the transformation carries a dark secret.  Science fiction has been there, done that.  Only better.

Targeted at the teenage crowd, the film doesn’t give kids much credit.  Intending to say simply that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, the plot muddles the message.  Where science fiction tropes could have been employed, investigated, or fleshed out, instead the story sticks to its simple message and never moves past it.  Body dysmorphia is current and real, but this story doesn’t give the subject its due importance, and its casting decisions don’t help.

Directed by McG (Supernatural, Chuck), the movie stars Bullet Train’s Joey King, a ringer for the younger Gilmore girl, as an “Ugly.”  “Friends” call her Squint for her horribly squinty eyes (eye roll).  Uglies is a movie, so of course only pretty actors were cast to star, which instantly sets the movie on the wrong track.  Trans actress Laverne Cox plays the show’s Big Bad, the sinister Dr. Cable, a woman who has taken over as the world went dystopian.  The forced procedure that is said to bring out everyone’s best self in fact sucks much of who they are away, making them docile and easy to manage.  Was casting a trans actor as someone who forces kids to have a biological procedure lost on the cast and crew?  It sure seems like Cox needs a new agent, and the movie comes off as a bit tone deaf.

If you can get beyond the obvious cringe, the obvious absurdness of every step of the story, what is left is another wannabe Twilight, Hunger Games, Divergent, or Maze Runner.  In other words, it’s “genre-light.”  It’s posing as science fiction, science fiction by someone who has never read any science fiction.  For what it borrows from Logan’s Run, that movie’s writers should have received some writing credit.  Even the black and grey costumes are a blatant knock-off the classic Sandman uniforms.

Uglies doesn’t even try to be Gattaca, which would be the subject matter at its best.  Chase Stokes (Outer Banks) plays Peris, Squint’s love interest… or maybe only a BFF.  The transformations would have been more fun and had more to say if they actually resulted in characters played by new actors.  Brianne Tju (I Know What You Did Last Summer) plays Shay, a friend who has a plan to escape the forced Pretty transformation, to go to a place called the Smoke, where people can be who they want to be without the transformation, where books aren’t banned.

The Smoke is led by a boy named David (played by The Tomorrow War’s Keith Powers), who, despite having two brilliant parents who helped save the world, is the one in charge.  Most of the story decisions in the movie are strange and silly.  At every step you will ask “why?”  If this is a utopia, why all the police?  If the secrets are so important, why is it so easy for a teenage girl to foil all the protections over and over?

Ultimately Squint is just a goofy kid, caught up in a plot where she must be James Bond 007 and infiltrate the fringe outlyers to save the rest of the world.  Just for fun, and no other real reason, Dr. Cable makes Peris into a super soldier.  Why? Nobody knows.

Uglies is a showcase of pretty people trying to educate everyone else ona  topic the writers didn’t seem to grasp.  I’m not sure any kid with image issues would be able to identify with Squint.  And if that isn’t happening, what is the point?  The topic and setting normally would indicate something for science fiction fans, but this misses the mark.

Uglies is now streaming on Netflix.