Uglies (2024)
Picture this! It’s planet earth in the not-too-distant future, but things have changed radically in some respects. Flying vehicles that we’d characterize as spaceships now routinely populate the sky of the urban landscape called “The City”. The urban space looks like a glossed up New York City on steroids and people have been divided into two camps known as Uglies – the pre-sixteen, unchanged humans – and the Pretties, those that have reached the milestone age and received their operations to transform them into something better – or is it better? This question – does the quest for or attainment of physical perfection make one “better” – is at the heart of the new Netflix film Uglies, directed by McG and written by Jacob Forman, Vanessa Taylor, and Whit Anderson. The film is packed with urgent social and political messages perfect for our moment in which social media is in overdrive, largely trading on limiting and often racist misperceptions of physical beauty and perfection that are literally killing us.
Given the timing of Australia’s recent ban on social media for children under sixteen, and a similar move in US states like Connecticut, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Mississippi, Tennessee, and Vermont which are exploring or have passed legislation requiring social media platforms to implement restrictions for minors, this movie is poised to activate much-needed debate. In Canada, although we are having the conversation, the Canadian Bill C-63, the Online Harms Act (which targets a range of harmful online content including child pornography) has yet to be passed into law.
Uglies follows Tally Youngblood (Joey King), a teenage girl who has, like her peers, been abandoned by her parents in the dorms where she is being indoctrinated into the teachings of the leader Dr. Cable (Laverne Cox) while awaiting her physical transformation. Uglies takes place in a world that is part utopian part dystopian. After war and ecological destruction depleted the earth’s natural resources, the peace that should have transpired was short-lived due to the human instinct to judge, separate, and compete based upon petty outward markers of identity. The solution? Create a world in which everyone gets to be beautiful therefore destroying the major source of competition and division, outward appearances. But to do so, the powerful Dr. Cable has created an enemy in the Rustees, those who are supposedly responsible for the planetary ecological destruction and who want to set civilization back by holding onto destructive practices and challenging the dominion and authority of The City.
When we meet the white, 15-year-old Tally and her best friend, the white Peris (Chase Stokes) they have bonded over their supposed ugliness, shared awkwardness, and desire for transformation. With the nicknames Squint and Nose respectively, they have singled out the physical attributes that they can’t wait to change and have bonded through matching scars that mark the palms of their hands; symbols of their friendship that they swear they will not have corrected during surgery. But the older Peris’ transformation demonstrates the changes that prettiness holds when he breaks his promise to meet Tally on a specific date and time after his surgery. When Tally goes looking for Peris in The City her best friend is no longer recognizable, emotionally.
But The City is not the place for Uglies and Tally is spotted by patrols as she tries to flee back to the dorms. It is the Asian, tom-boy Shay (Brianne Tju), fellow pre-sixteen, dormitory-bound student, who rescues Tally. (Importantly, they share the same birthday and thus potentially the same transformation day.) Shay opens Tally to another world with her hover-boards, paper books (she reads and secretly shares banned books with other students like Henry David Thoreau), and talk of The Smoke, the mythical land where people have gone to resist the ideologies of The City and refuse to become “beautiful”. To understand the society in which Tally, Peris, and Shay have been raised is to grasp that they have been raised to believe that they are simply not enough as they are. Sound familiar?
The “schooling” to which they have been subjected as pre-teens and teens (away from their parents) indoctrinated them into Dr. Cable’s polarized politics of good and evil and set them up to reject both their physical selves and any sense of wholeness outside of bodily aesthetics. Interestingly, while the pretties that Tally encounters in The City are of different races and complexions, they are uniformly slender and fit, with a penchant for showing off their bodies. The initial glimpse of The City we are given when Tally sneaks in is quite revealing. Although glamorously dressed and outwardly joyful, they city-dwellers are vacuous in their unending desire to socialize and party. It’s carnival all-year-round and the point of life seems to be complimenting and being complemented on one’s looks.
So, when Shay implores Tally to go with her to live with the Rustees in The Smoke, Tally is torn. Her entire young life has been lived with the expectation of her glorious transformation. Quite literally, a chief pastime of her dorm-room existence (and that of her classmates) was creating unending images of their impending transformations (should my eyes be gold or green, my hair long and curly or short and straight, my face slimmer, my lips, fuller?). This context has birthed in Tally – and the society – not just an obsessive preoccupation with looks, but with what supposedly improved or perfected looks will mean for their happiness.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Shay leaves for The Smoke without Tally giving her a coded map should she ever change her mind. Their exchange before Shay’s departure is one of the most moving and revealing of the film. When the impassioned Shay implores Tally to leave with her to be free, Tally responds, “I don’t want to be free, I want to be pretty!” But back on the fringes of The City, Tally is denied her birthday transformation and taken instead to Dr. Cable (always dressed symbolically in head-to-toe white), who informs her of the betrayal of the supposedly dangerous rebels who Shay has now joined. If Tally wants her surgery and wants to help her friend Shay, Cable suggests, she must wear a tracker (disguised as a necklace) and infiltrate The Smoke so that The City can destroy the rebel encampment.
After a harrowing and dangerous hover board journey, Tally arrives solo in The Smoke, the first person to do so. But nobody is there, so she obeys Shay’s coded map and falls asleep in a field of white tiger lilies. Like Cable’s white suits, the white tiger lilies are a powerful symbol throughout the film. Although Tally and the indoctrinated have been taught that the lilies were powerful engineered flowers that healed the earth of toxic pollution, the reverse is actually true. As Tally comes to find out, the lilies were indeed engineered but work instead to spread toxins to force resistant communities from living outside of The City. So, when Tally awakens, the field is on fire, and it is the brave black leader David (Keith Powers) who scoops her up and saves her from the flames before they are airlifted into a helicopter. But there are plenty of scene-stealing heroics by the film’s female leads too, including Tally, Shay, and Maddy!
Back at their encampment, Tally and Shay are thrilled to be reunited, but not everyone is buying Tally’s miraculous solo trek to The Smoke. The suspicious Croy (Jan Luis Castellanos) smells a con and challenges Tally’s presence. We’d like to point out at this juncture that some of the people in The Smoke are “naturally” beautiful, like David and Croy, which may appear as a contradiction in the movie. But another interpretation is that they have opted, despite their gorgeous looks, for a life in which their physical appearance would not become a central preoccupation.
When Tally is introduced into The Smoke, she sees a vibrant, compassionate, natural way of life, where people depend upon each other’s kindness and compassion and function in a society without money, greed, and conspicuous consumption. There are sparks between her and David and he gifts her the seemingly simple present of a pair of his gloves. However, the perceptive Shay informs Tally that there is nothing simple about such a gift in a society where everything is hand-made. Physical work is a necessity for everyone’s survival, but intellectual labour is also amplified. When Tally balks at learning to dismantle the old train tracks, David instructs her “move a muscle, change a thought.”
It is the black David who was raised by both of his parents and the white Tally who was abandoned by hers to the dormitories on the outskirts of The City as a small child. Powerfully then, when David brings Tally to meet his parents, she is surprised by the family devotion and resemblance, something that was obliterated for her and her parents when they underwent the operation to become pretties. It is through David’s parents, Maddy (the gold locks-wearing Charmin Lee) and Az (Jay Devon Johnson) that we finally get the backstory on the medical procedure that transforms Uglies into Pretties. You see the two are medical doctors who were once a part of Dr. Cable’s inner circle until they discovered that the surgeries were not simply designed to transform a patient’s outsides, but to produce lesions on the brain which literally disabled one’s ability to think and reason. (Hence the potent increase in mind-numbing, self-obsession, and aesthetic preoccupation of the pretties.) But this deliberate shift – not a side effect – is of course something of which the people are completely unaware. Maddy and Az’s ethics did not allow them to continue working with Dr. Cable after this discovery. Instead, in The Smoke they have committed their lives to creating a cure in their laboratory that can heal the lesions and restore the pretties’ ability to think and reason.
Disastrously, the effectiveness of Tally’s tracker leads Dr. Cable to The Smoke where Peris, now transformed by multiple procedures, kills Az and assists in taking the community hostage. Cable’s plan? Subject everyone to the transformation to put down the rebellion and destroy The Smoke since, according to her, free thinking is a cancer and only certain people are fit to lead. But hope is not dead as quick-thinking Maddy drops a vial of liquid into David’s vest before Cable’s guards destroy their lab, and Tally and David flee as the members of the Smoke are being rounded up.
Although Tally and David infiltrate Dr. Cable’s compound and free the hostages, they are too late to save Shay who was the first to be subjected to the transformation. Now bustier, curvier, with her once short hair long and styled, Shay announces her joy at her transformation as she emerges from the operation pod and greets her friends. Tally’s guilt is palpable as she looks desperately into Shay’s now golden eyes, for traces of the girl who once desired liberty above all else. But their reunion is cut short as Cable’s soldiers arrive to try to retake the prisoners.
Tally beseeches the group to flee as she surrenders herself knowing full well that Cable will subject her to the transformation. Taking responsibility for the damage and death she has brought on The Smoke (and to David’s family), she assures him that she is strong enough to resist the mind-altering effects of the operation and that she will know that he forgives her if he returns for her. She also promises to preserve an unmistakable symbol of her selfness that David will recognize to know she is still Tally.
Uglies has lots of action without lots of gore or explicit sexuality, making it suitable for children and teens. But the messages of resistance, individuality, self-reliance, and the care of the mind are timely for everyone in our increasingly high-tech moment of encroaching AI and social media dominance.
Uglies holds many compelling stories: like the ride-or-die female friendship of Tally and Shay, the family devotion of David and his parents, the single-minded, corrupt rule of Dr. Cable, the power of community in The Smoke, and the young love of Tally and David. By the end of this sci-fi, action movie, we were left with the suspense of Tally’s forced transformation, Maddy’s promising cure, David’s potential return, and the resumption of Tally and David’s blossoming love story. When the film ends, we get a final glimpse of Tally’s open palm, scar intact. Not quite pretty after all then. Wink!