After 19 years of fans waiting for the New York Times best-selling book The Uglies to be turned into a movie, Netflix released Uglies on September 13th.
The movie is set in a dystopian world where the planet is brought to the verge of collapse due to the extensive use of fossil fuels and humans fighting wars for resources. However, the world’s leading scientists thought of a surgery that makes everyone equal. The movie focuses on Tally Youngblood—a young girl who wants nothing more than to become 16 and to have a surgery that makes you a “Pretty”—someone who has taken the surgery.
However, the truth is revealed to her when she meets Shay—another “Ugly.” While all Uglies want nothing more than to have the surgery, Shay wants to live with the Smokes, a group of Uglies who have never had the surgery. After Shay leaves to go to the Smoke, Youngblood is told by the leader of the city to follow her to the Smoke’s secret location and reveal it to her.
When Youngblood makes it to the Smoke, she realizes that they are not villains and that David, the one in charge of the Smoke, is not who people make him out to be. There, she finds out that the surgery to make people “pretty” is an operation to implant a chip inside their brain to numb them. Youngblood throws away her tracker in horror now that she knows the truth behind the surgery.
The tracker goes off, bringing the city leader and her army to the Smoke. After the city leader kills David’s father, they take the rest of the Smoke as prisoners to give them the surgery. Youngblood frees them and undergoes the surgery to test out a cure David’s mom has been making.
For those who are watching the movie after reading the book, it may seem very rushed because the characters aren’t developed and built up enough to fully understand. Moreover, they didn’t focus enough on the Smoke and focused too much on Youngblood in the beginning of the movie when in her dorms. However, I thought it was very cool to see the pages come to life before my eyes. I believe that anyone else who has read the book would agree.
The movie portrayed Youngblood’s inward struggles vividly and helped invest anyone watching, laying out a common theme that has been and always will be true; what’s on the outside isn’t what makes people beautiful.
