I have to say that the movie trailer already raised some red flags for me, but I decided to give it a chance and confirmed all my fears: Uglies is a young adult science fiction dystopia that arrives late, at a time when as viewers we’ve seen it all in a subgenre that has become outdated after the success of The Hunger Games, especially in the 2010s.
No, I’m not saying it’s time to give up on this type of release. As someone who grew up with the whole phenomenon of The Hunger Games, even rivaling Marvel Studios’ superhero movies at the box office, I would love to experience a boom like that again. However, I believe that to achieve that, we need more than just repeating clichés and relying on a rather uninspired script like this. Uglies, instead of trying to revive the genre with a refreshing proposal, seems to be trying to bury it by gathering its worst habits into one product.
This movie was first discussed in 2006
Part of the problem may lie in the difficulty of bringing to the big screen a premise like the one that helped Betrayal, the novel by Scott Westerfeld on which the film is based, become a literary success for which several Hollywood studios fought to obtain its rights 18 years ago (even before The Hunger Games hit theaters in 2012). This premise takes us to a not-so-distant post-apocalyptic future where ugliness does not exist in adulthood, as everyone goes through a process that makes them “pretty” and allows the elimination of inequality as if it were that simple.
The message of Uglies, as you can imagine, is a critique of the superficiality that surrounds us, of those unattainable beauty standards that are sometimes imposed on society. This denunciation may have worked very well in its original format, inviting the reader to accept themselves as they are. However, as a movie, this is a denunciation that I don’t quite see narrated appropriately, simply showing us that getting surgery makes us stupid and mean.
100 minutes of runtime with little action and direction
So, delving deeper into what we see in Uglies, the film follows the steps of Tally (Joey King), a girl eager to leave her childhood behind and have longer legs, brighter eyes, etc. However, all this hides a truth that we will soon discover, starting a story of action and adventure that cannot progress at a decent pace, where a group of outlaws (“smokies”) tries to confront a tyrannical system. Nothing that we haven’t seen in countless examples over the past decade.
Uglies (Betrayal 1) (Montena)
* Prices may have changed since the last update.
In conclusion, Uglies is another young adult science fiction dystopia that fails to excite us in nearly 100 minutes of footage. The movie is boring, and its attempts to make us believe that we are in a futuristic world no longer resonate, although I admit that the thrilling chase scene through that big city full of CGI didn’t entirely displease me. Even so, up to that brief moment, I had a sense of déjà vu while watching it.
With a cheesy premise, limited action scenes, and an excess of character glamorization, the actors don’t stand a chance to shine, although they do play their roles well.
It may find some success in streaming that forces Netflix to continue its story, which would be appreciated since the film ends with an open ending. However, I don’t think watching it will bring something new that we haven’t seen in recent years. Perhaps Uglies should have been released 18 years ago to have its chance, but today it feels like a horrible product completely out of its time.
In 3DJuegos | Steven Spielberg created one of the most cursed films in history, and although it remained marked forever, it became a cult classic, Poltergeist
In 3DJuegos | The Rings of Power plays with The Lord of the Rings story to tell how one of the key moments of Tolkien’s enduring work came to be
