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SPOILER ALERT: This post contains spoilers for Netflix‘s Uglies movie.
Uglies author Scott Westerfeld always hoped that one of his readers would take action to get his book adapted to the screen, and he got his wish when Joey King read the books and later pitched them to Netflix.
The movie, now out on the streamer, adapts the first book in Westerfeld’s quartet, which came out in 2003 and told the tale of Tally Youngblood (King in the movie) who is ready to get the obligatory cosmetic operation that makes sixteen-year-olds pretty in her futuristic society. This way of life takes on a different meaning when Tally is tasked with recovering her missing friend Shay (Brianne Tju) from The Smoke, a community of rebels who leave the city and forego surgery to live a simpler life.
“When I wrote the book in the early 2000s I was mostly talking about real plastic surgery, but now what most people do to change their appearance is digital, you blur your face, or you filter it,” Westerfeld said. “And we do that with our whole lives, we blur the parts of our lives we don’t like, and we just show ourselves having a great time and so a lot of what being a Pretty is means something completely different now. It’s much less literal and much more like we all have this magic to change our appearance every day. There’s something really interesting about how the technology has made the book more trenchant and more interesting.”
Director McG called the movie an “answer to FaceTune.”
“People are very hung up on trying to realize an unobtainable idea of beauty, and the days of taking a picture and putting it on Instagram are over. You have to filter everything and edit, now we even have AI to take it higher,” he told Deadline. We’re caught up in trying to show the world something false and something we’re not. I thought this film spoke to that idea and allowed me to share with the world that beauty is interior, and what you have is perfect. On top of that, the irony is, that when you really connect with someone for all the right reasons, and you get along very well, the physical characteristics of that person become attractive. I thought that was a very interesting thing to explore while making a big movie with romance and adventure and action and telling the story of a young hero who grows into her heroic self.”
McG also acknowledged film adaptations of books like The Hunger Games and Divergent, explaining how Uglies moves past that moment in the market, which saw a boom in YA dystopian stories ten years ago.
“I wanted to make sure that this film worked for 2024, and beyond. And the world has changed a lot. I think social media has shaped the mentality of contemporary culture, and particularly with young people, to such a high degree that, the story in particular of this film, which is, of course, about this gigantic surgery that you’re presented the opportunity to go through with at age 16, I find that so timely and very different than those other films that you mentioned,” he said. “But at the same time, I think the central construct of this film is decidedly different, because we’re living in an age where trying to chase a beauty standard is resulting in people feeling poorly about themselves and I think that’s sad.”
Laverne Cox’s villain Dr. Cable also plays into the timeliness of the film as she operates with an unchallenged authority that reflects how members of society like Tally haven’t thought to question their way of life.
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“You’ve got to remember, the great villains, they don’t think they’re villains on paper,” McG said. “What new pretty town is offering is wonderful, and what Dr. Cable is offering is wonderful. There’s no cancer in New Pretty Town. There’s no racism, there’s no sexism. All of these things are wonderful points of advancement. Who wouldn’t be in favor of that stuff, but ultimately, the price you pay of losing your humanity, losing your choice, is just too high. That’s the beautiful complication of what Dr. Cable is advocating. Buying into the idea that absolute power corrupts absolutely is very timely in this season of election here in the United States. You’ve got to have checks and balances, and you can’t get into an authoritarian space or you get into trouble.”
One of the biggest changes in the book’s translation to screen involves the arc of Peris (Chase Stokes), Tally’s best friend from childhood. In the book series, Peris turns Pretty before Tally, but his surgery stops there. In the film, Dr. Cable offers to make him a Special, or an advanced Pretty with superhuman capabilities that allow them to hunt down escaped Uglies and reinforce the confines of the City.
“Peris kind of fizzles out as a character [in the books]. He chickens out multiple times. He’s like Tally, if Tally didn’t have that drive or if Tally didn’t have Shay pushing her. And so he’s a road not taken for her, which is interesting in a quiet, literary way,” Westerfeld said. “But movies have a different aesthetic and they like bigger story arcs. So to make him Special and to make him betray her in a different way, in a much more active way seemed like a bigger move to us.”
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McG compared the dynamic between Tally and Peris to that between villain Darth Vader and his son Luke Skywalker in Star Wars. The love is still there.
“The whole point of that, of that arc, is I love this romantic idea of how hard the system tries to change him, His will and His love for Tally is so powerful that it transcends surgery, and when he sees her, there’s still so much power,” he said. “I’m just romantic in that way that I want love to win in the end, and that’s why, in that final scene on the rooftop, Paris can’t even bring himself to speak to Tally until he’s hanging off the edge of the building and he calls her by her nickname, again, with a broken look on his face. Then he falls to — I’m not going to say it was his death. I would never say that. Of course, he fell into the fog. I want [viewers to wonder] is he or isn’t he alive in there? Is he or isn’t he good or bad? Has Cable won or has his affection for his friend won out in the end, and I love stories that explore those emotions.”
Peris’ literal cliffhanger moment is not the only loose thread in the ending that could leave room for a sequel film. Though Tally does end up getting the surgery for a noble reason, she keeps her scar on her hand in the process, which is a symbol of her friendship with Peris. He didn’t keep his scar through surgery, but the remaining blemish on Tally’s palm signals that she still intends to go through with the plan of breaking out of New Pretty Town to serve as a test subject for a cure that erases the brain lesions that come with the cosmetic surgery.
“The audience needs to speak up and say we should finish the book series. Obviously, it’s a series of books. The story goes on, but we need to have everybody clamor for it, because it’s tough to get movies made, and it needs to be worth it, and they’re expensive,” McG said. “We’re all very optimistic that the stories will continue, and of course, that’s why we signed up for this in the first place. It’s a series of books, and we want to tell the full story.”
Westerfeld — who has a cameo as a Wheelbarrow Smokie (similar to The Boss in the books) — would back future films, and maybe even a trilogy.
“I am a true science fiction reader, and that I think in trilogies, and I think making this movie as a trilogy or more is just my natural storytelling,” he said. “I think at least teenagers will always be very interested in dystopia, because [in] high school, you stand up and sit down at the ringing of a bell. Sometimes you wear a uniform. Sometimes you’ve got to get your hair cut a certain length. Teenagers are very interested in the amount of control that they’re under. So dystopias of control are highly relevant to them, where the government is oppressing you because they’re being oppressed by their parents when they’re old enough to start making decisions, but they really can’t make them yet. I think it’s just a natural genre that teenagers will always be in love with, and will always return to whether or not the market is saturated as it was 10 ish years ago, by those kinds of images.”
