We open on a world bathed in concrete gray. There’s a powerful government, a postapocalyptic class system with a telling name, and an unassuming teenager primed to start a worldwide revolution. Sound familiar? That’s because it’s the underpinning of most popular dystopian young adult franchises, including Uglies, a mid-aughts novel series by Scott Westerfeld that has finally been adapted to film (now streaming on Netflix). Unfortunately, while Westerfeld’s books were memorable trendsetters in the genre, the long-awaited movie feels like a collection of YA clichés. And it isn’t just a frame-by-frame redux of some of the most disappointing aspects of the category. It’s proof that such expansive works and worlds deserve equally expansive treatment onscreen — approaches that live-action recreations simply can’t sustain.
The story follows Tally Youngblood (Joey King), a girl on the cusp of 16. She feels hideous, but it’s not her fault. She lives in a society where every person has an aggressive, life-altering cosmetic procedure on their sixteenth birthday that transforms them into a perfectly symmetrical beauty. Children Tally’s age and younger are called Uglies; after their birthday procedures, they’re Pretties, allowed to live and play among the city’s beautiful inhabitants. After a failed attempt to sneak into the Pretty part of town to see her best friend Peris (Chase Stokes), who’s already had his surgery, Tally meets a fellow 15-year-old, Shay (Brianne Tju), who shares her birthday. They quickly develop an intense bond, riding their hoverboards and fantasizing about what they want their new faces to look like. But when Shay decides to skip her procedure and runs off to a secret community of surgery-deniers called the Smoke, the government sends Tally on a mission to infiltrate the camp. All she has to do is turn the outlaws in, and she’ll finally be Pretty. Tally’s time with the people of the Smoke, however —plus a budding romance with their leader, David (Keith Powers) — opens her eyes to harsh truths about the Pretties. Soon she is forced to choose between the life she thought she always wanted and a new home she’d never even considered.
As a film, Uglies is in predictable form for a Netflix YA adaptation. The muted color palette is matched by lackluster performances from the cast, the exposition relies on what feels like stock footage, and the copious amounts of VFX manage to make the project feel dated and entirely unbelievable. (The only bright spot is an inspired performance from Tju as the rebellious Shay.) But the film’s glaring lack of imagination doesn’t lie in its source material. Westerfeld’s dystopia pulls off one of the most unforgettable reveals in YA history by playing with our notions of beauty. In the books, Tally looks at carefully preserved magazines of a previous time, which are easily recognizable for readers as a combination of tabloids and standard celebrity-packed glossies. But in her eyes, every single famous person isn’t beautiful. They’re Uglies. It’s an unexpected twist that in this new culture, beauty isn’t just about poreless skin and taut features. To be pretty in this dystopia means becoming monstrous.
Yet the adaptation can’t even begin to capture this essential nuance, making do by yassifying the cast with something akin to a heavy-handed Facetune. The book’s critique of governmental bread and circuses to mollify the masses also gets neutered, as the film ironically shoves cameos by other Netflix stars into every available minute — as if reminding viewers there’s plenty else to watch here once the film ends. (Stokes and King each helm their own Netflix series. There’s also Laverne Cox of Orange Is The New Black fame, Luke Eisner from Tall Girl 2, Selling Sunset star Breana Tiesi, and either model Lucky Blue Smith or someone who just looks a hell of a lot like him.)
But these flaws aren’t unique. In fact, there’s a slew of YA failures built off the backs of beloved works — Beautiful Creatures, Eragon, The Giver, City of Ember, Divergent, and The Darkest Minds — that suffer from the same main problem: Live-action film just can’t recreate the size and scope of their imaginary settings. After the massive success of The Hunger Games, it’s clear that studio executives will never stop greenlighting YA adaptations with Your Favorite Stars on the off chance that one will spawn the next runaway hit franchise. In fact, there are some already in the works, including a television version of Harry Potter, and a big-screen take on Tomi Adeymi’s hit fantasy series Children of Blood and Bone. All the while, film and television creators are ignoring the better option for adaptations that’s right in front of them: animation.
In this era of remakes, live action has been treated as the end-all-be-all, especially in the case of animated classics. There have been star-studded, live-action reboots of famed children’s fare like The Lion King, Beauty and The Beast, The Jungle Book, Dumbo, Mulan, and The Little Mermaid. And every single one has been criticized for failing to live up to the inspired world of its predecessor. But animation can operate in the gaps where live action fails. Artists can render a story not bound by the laws of filming real people in the real world. Yes, with enough time and money, VFX can create incredible spectacles. But let’s be honest, no studio is going to give a YA movie the same budget as James Cameron’s VFX masterpiece Avatar: The Way of Water. One of animation’s biggest strengths also lies in the way it can convey emotion as a physical presence. There are boundless art styles and creative choices that can be made in the animation process, like the Oscar-winning Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse’s ability to turn Miles Morale’s leap of faith off a high building into a scene of a scared boy literally rising to meet his destiny, or how the 2001 Japanese film Spirited Away gave a mystical dragon the sunken eyes of grief during an in-flight battle. It’s almost glaringly easy to see how an animated adaptation of Uglies might have portrayed its city powered by fields of environment-killing flowers, multi-tentacled party machines that roam the streets releasing fireworks or music, and hoverboards guided by magnetic levitation and thrusters.
The best YA books get — and stay— popular because of the space for imagination they leave their readers. They are limitless stories with challenging social systems and captivating universes. And with every new generation, the young adult books that define them get more and more inventive. When it comes to translating the worlds these stories create in our minds to the screen, these books deserve better. And so do viewers.
