Uglies (2024)

Uglies arrives nearly two decades after Scott Westerfeld's novel, which is a long time to wait for a lecture about cheekbones. The setting is a post-resource-collapse society that solved prejudice by giving everyone the same face at sixteen. Our heroine, Tally, waits her turn, watches her friend return from the operating table hollowed out, and then defects to a forest commune that reads Thoreau and burns genetically modified orchids. McG directs it all with the brisk efficiency of a man who has a call sheet and a lunch break to protect.

The film's moral engine runs on body positivity, and it runs hot. The surgery is the villain, conformity is the sin, and the scar on Tally's hand is the sacrament. That is a genuine and legible argument about enforced beauty standards, even if the script states it three or four times per act in case we missed the first two. The feminist scaffolding is present too: a young woman refuses a patriarchal system that decides what she is allowed to look like, then volunteers to walk back into it armed with a cure. It is sturdy material, handled with the subtlety of a wellness infographic.

The supporting architecture is thinner. Climate anxiety hums in the background, resource depletion and a toxic energy source that nobody investigates with much urgency. There is a swipe at consumerist docility and authoritarian comfort, though the film never commits to an economic argument. The cast is diverse in the modern studio manner, which is to say visibly and without a single line of dialogue about it. No queer threads, no neurodivergent framing, no interest in rewriting history. The residue is a competent, glossy, faintly exhausting piece of young adult product, sincere in its self-acceptance sermon and about as subversive as a mall directory.