‘Uglies’ Director And Author Discuss Film’s Big Changes And 2024 Relevance

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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.