On September 13th, the new movie Uglies became available on Netflix. The film tells a story about a dystopian society, where people “choose” to undergo cosmetic surgery on their 16th birthday, in an effort to eradicate discrimination. The idea pushed forward is that if everyone is “pretty”, there will be no judgment based on looks.
To put it simply, this movie sucks. It is disrespectful to the art of filmmaking. I loved the books in elementary school, so to see them adapted so badly is incredibly disappointing. It seems the internet agrees with me, given the 15% rating on Rotten Tomatoes and the 4.8/10 rating on IMDb. The “pretties” looked like they had the bold glamour filter on, and it just looked weird. The pace felt rushed, and the acting was not very good (sorry, Joey King…). It was an astonishingly horrible watch, and I would not recommend it. The CGI was also really, really, bad. The scenes with the hoverboards looked fake and were honestly laughable, making the overall story seem more ridiculous.
Conversations have also been had about the fact this this movie was live-action, rather than animation. Many people have said that using live-action limited the movie and made it underwhelming, rather than pushing boundaries. They think that because it is live-action, it’s impossible to properly display the setting, and characters. I do think it’s a little strange that they actually cast people to play uglies… nonetheless, if it was animation they would have been able to make the “pretties” look that much more unsettling, further conveying one of the main themes of the movie. Though I do agree with this to some extent, I don’t like animations that much, so I probably wouldn’t have watched the movie. That being said I do agree that it would have pushed the story further.
Honestly, there’s not much more I can say about this movie. It was just bad, and I would like the time I wasted watching it back. If you like it, that’s your opinion, but I feel we have to acknowledge that it was definitely a letdown compared to the books. I have to say, with these ratings, I don’t think we will be getting Pretties (book two). Overall, I would rate this movie 2.5/10 Viking Heads.
