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I swear netflix only made it so that people would be like "this is just a worse version of the hunger games... the hunger games were good lets rewatch them..on netflix"
Yeah tbh I wouldn't be surprised if some marketing director noticed that bad movies tend to get a lot of free advertising on youtube and this is essentially cinematic clickbait/ragebait
And I get the sinking suspicion that the social commentary that is played for a joke in Cars about sponsorship and celebrity culture is much more interesting than in this movie lol
it would’ve been so easy to follow uncanny beauty, the symmetrical faces, Eurocentric features, lack of expression but no lets get sponsored by Snapchat’s makeup filter
I couldn't help but think about how insane the faces in the short film "Human Form" were. In ten minutes they made a way more compeling story, while perfectly showing the absurdirty of beauty standards.
I do understand that the point of the movie is that Beauty standards are arbitrary and change over time, and that in this distant future, what we consider to be beautiful today isn't beautiful anymore. But like... the Pretties look beautiful by 2020s standards. they fit OUR standards. The book made a big point of describing them in ways we'd find weird today. The theme doesnt work unless they look DISTINCTLY different from the uglies.
I'm reminded of an old black-and-white episode of "The Outer Limits". There was a woman who was born with a disfigured face, which was concealed for most of the episode. The faces of the attending doctors and nurses were obscured by shadows. At the end of the episode, it was revealed that the main character looked like a beautiful woman, and everybody else had saggy, pig-like faces.
I KNOW I was looking forward to seeing how creatively they could interpret the book but it’s like they purposefully ignored the most interesting parts of the book
It's been years since I read the book (2009 or 2010 back in primary school). The main thing I remember is David telling Tally that she's not ugly and is actually attractive and I think Tally is the one who's harsh on her appearance but her flaws are all normal things. Side note, I remember at the start of pretties, Tally gets injured and it leaves a small scar even as a pretty. And I feel like she had red hair or the cover of the book had red hair.
It's so frustrating that they entirely ignored the eugenics-y phrenological nature of the procedure and what makes a person "pretty" in the books. In the books, they go into each specific feature that different members of society are given to affect the "subconscious" ways others view them. They justify it by saying it's all based on science and this is why they are better than their predecessors. Also, it is explicitly said on multiple occasions in the books that the procedure makes everyone the same skin tone that is a nearly perfect middle of all human skin colors (so no one is super pale, no one is super dark, everyone is a sort of middle tan). This faulty "science" being used to justify eugenics and utilitarian power is gradually dismantled throughout the books through the eyes of Tally. I always worried that an adaptation would be near impossible due to this among other factors and this movie has proven that right.
The books were amazing! I always thought they would make great movies, but you have to keep the nuance! Especially disappointed with how the specials just looked regular 😢
@@ImARealCat Exactly! I have a lot of problems with this adaptation beyond just the visuals, but it would have been so neat if they'd really leaned into making the pretties uncannily unnaturally beautiful and the specials that terrifying beauty that makes your skin crawl with ice. A combination of practical effects makeup and CGI absolutely could have achieved this. The specials need to look unnatural and unnerving, not just like some chad with contact lenses.
Yuppp. I always thought it was interesting that there were other, much more unusual beauty standards for specific groups, like the Specials. The Specials are designed to look more frightening (in addition to their increased strength and stuff) since that makes them a more intimidating police force.
This is why you should never hope that media you like gets adapted to film or tv :D But anyway, who's Tally? Are you talking about hit YA protagonist Squint?
its a shame because i remember enjoying this series when i read it as a kid. pretty sure the 'uglies' are supposed to be normal people like us, their society has just gotten to a point where even todays beauty standards aren't enough. 'pretties' were described as being beyond comprehension in their beauty iirc
I read the series while working as an assistant at a school library. I thought it was pretty interesting, and liked that it considered some important themes, especially for its audience. From the video responses I’ve seen (I’m not watching the movie, hah), the adaptation barely follows the plot of the book, like a weird fan fiction vaguely based on the characters and world. Oh well! Glad you enjoyed the books!
I know that Hollywood typically fucks up YA book -> movie adaptations, but this is egregious. I read this series throughout middle school as they were coming out and loved them! A key note is that they were coming out on the front end of the dystopian YA lit bubble, so while the genre is a bit played out after a couple of decades, the concept of Uglies was novel at the time.
With the point of the uglies not being ugly, instead of changing those actors they should have turned the uncanny beauty of the pretties up to 11. The casting director was right about one of the themes of the book being that the uglies aren’t actually ugly, but the lack of contrast kills the theme.
Yep when there’s cgi involved you can tell there’s loads of it and plus they will be there for the rest of their lives going through treatments to remain vein .
Oh yeah give me some of that teen lesbian tension. When i reread the Hunger games i also had the impression Madge had a thing for Katniss but i bet the director realized this and removed Madge from the movie... good look trying to adapt who gave Katniss the mockingjay pin bc it sure will be a prominent topic in the upcoming THG book
Honestly I was kinda blindsided by Shay not being part of the very-obviously-set-up love triangle, like "ok, so the contrasting love interests are Nose and Shay, pretty standard character archetypes but neat to see some queer rep- wait, she's not a love interest?"
I remember reading this book series when I was younger and I know there's a whole thing of "movies based on books are worse!" but I really think that this book series was better as a book series and shouldn't have been adapted. The concept of "it'll never be enough" and "don't judge others for looking different" really sits better when the reader can imagine their own perceived "flaws" onto the main character instead of being shown a character that they have no tie to and may not have the same "flaws" as the viewer
Could you say the book was beautiful and the movie was....not beautiful? Almost as if it was, dare I say...disgusting? No...the fuck was that word I'm looking for... Fuck!
Fairly Odd Parents tore this idea apart years ago - Timmy wishes for everyone to be identical grey blobs, but then they are still bullying each other for not being "As" grey or blobby as the in-crowd. Even if everyone is identical, they'll FIND things to be shit about.
Yeah. Also beauty is entirely subjective, I know people who find being overweight attractive. I know people who find the elderly attractive. If this whole thing is going to work you're going to need to forcefully modify everyone's brains to have the same standards of beauty and if you're doing that you may as well just skip the beauty stuff and change their brains to be more cooperative and less tribalistic. I guess what I'm saying is, mind control is awesome and I can't wait for it!
You're onto something because Tally/Shay drives the book plot through Specials (3rd out of 4 books, 4th book is a later timeline different characters) but the David part is extremely vital plot-wise. It's not wlw though, or if so one-directional. Don't watch the movies
i will NEVER EVER stop YAPPING and DROOLING over his cardboard backgrounds, honestly they make me SO happy, super creative and cute. id love to watch a show with shit like that. May actually make a project using those kinds of cardboard backgrounds since I think theyre so cool!
I met Orr irl He stole my bf and broke both my kneecaps then he proceeded to emote on my screaming husk of a body.. 10/10 experience will recommend 👍💯🔥
Laverne Cox's performance was by far the best part if this entire dumpster fire. I would love to see her in similar roles that are actually well written, she would be an iconic villain.
i think in the book, the necklace is destroyed by like. a rock. which is at least slightly more reasonable. also the way they take the cure is DEFINITELY not in the book, i think they just know someone who figures out the formula. i read it in middle school & am in my late twenties now, so who knows. i just remember that 90% of the reason i read the trilogy because it felt like tally & shay had some sort of red string of fate thing going on where they were constantly forced on opposite sides just by virtue of the politics of the world around them. baby's first tragic lesbian romance. i DO remember tally being like, incredibly desperate about being pretty in the book. like it felt like she thought her life was over because she couldn't get the surgery
here in parkour civilization, no one chooses to jump for the beef. it's better to be safe and do the one block jump for the chicken rather than risk your entire life.
he means its not that hard to get actors in their early 20s that look like teens. no one expects actual teenagers playing teenagers, just for them not to look 35
Why the hunks always have stupid names 😭 Peeta and Gale are passable, they’re sorta cute. But Four? Nose? Like wtf what happened to Matthew, Johnny, I’d even take a Chad 😭 Shoutout to the immortal instruments for breaking the generational trauma, everyone’s got normal and/or cool names there
well weird names are meant to communicate the teen dystopia thing, to show the differences in their society and ours. in the books, david is a weird name to them
@@_edenfalls I mean, that's a good explanation, but no one forced these authors to name their hunks "Four" and "Nose" 😭 They could have cool different names. Katniss, Effie and Haymitch are cool and sorta weird names that don't really sound like any modern culture. Yet I think naming a character, and a lead at that, something downright stupid takes away from the suspension of disbelief, makes it hard to take the character and story seriously.
26:16 You clearly didn't take classes on how to treat deep wounds in middle school. It's also pretty safe to say that you also skipped the classes on free-soloing huge mountains.
I feel like being good at everything with very little explanation is just the chosen one trope, which usually has to do with Jungian/Campbellian reasons. It’s just that these movies don’t do much else with that framework beyond a very basic hero’s journey. Which isn’t necessarily the worst thing. Stories can be simple. I think there is a lot to be desired in execution though. At least in the movies. Usually books are better at this.
Exactly a good movie doesn't have to be over complicated but these dull movies these streaming platforms(especially Netflix) keep releasing are just to mediocre.
i mean stories are either in medias res meaning they start in the past, or they're not, meaning they start in the present - a lot of stories begin with the first thing happening rather than "(record scratch) yup that's me"
ayy knew that this would be about Uglies as soon as I got the notification; my dad got me to watch this with him and once he fell asleep i didn’t bother to finish it, wasn’t different or interesting enough to care, all it had was a couple pretty scenes tbh. definitely a ‘screensaver’ movie
It's absolute lunacy someone developed this script, Netflix approved it, people filmed it and they all looked at the premise and said "yes, good, this is great" at every point of the process
Listening to A Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, and goddamn- It's making me appreciate the hunger games so much more, and how none of the other "teen dystopias" was nearly as good.
I didn’t know there was going to be a new Hunger Games book next year until a few days ago and legit got excited as a nearly 40 year old man. Hunger Games was definitely the best of all these. Maze Runner is a close second though. Then a GIANT PRECIPICE to all the rest of them.
Random comment but I just have to shout out my fav horrible ADR over a crowd scene EVER, which also just happens to be a teen dystopian, and that's in episode one of the 100 when Octavia runs forward and someone shouts clear as a bell "that's the girl they found in the floor!" Thank you for the exposition random bystander lmao.
The fact that they seemingly rebel because they are treated worse for being ugly when all of them can literally wait like 1 year and get a free surgery to solve the dividing issue of the distopia is what gets me.
The point of the book series is to highllight how beauty standards are arbitrary, and keeps changing. It's a critique of social media, model industries and body image. It's a world that doesn't care about diversity or identity. The rebellion is not "wah, we are ugly and no one loves us" but "we don't want a world where everyone is forced into one mold by eugenic mindsets."
From what I remember when I read the books over a decade ago, the “Pretties” are supposed to basically look AI generated. I hate that they didn’t even try to nail that “beautifully uncanny” look😒 it’s not like Netflix doesn’t have the budget for it
I'm an indie self-published author and stories like me upset me so damn much. Like sure I would love to have work adapted, but like it just feels like no one cared about the story and only cared about the money. Can we start writing movies for the story PLEASE?
as someone who read and enjoyed the books as a teen i hate this stupid movie so much because the book actually had something to say and the movie couldn't have been made by anyone who cared less about the source material
the original trilogy goes uglies -> pretties -> specials, where tally becomes increasingly coopted by the government's promises of easy beauty and turned into something that's less and less of a person - the specials have crazy tiger fangs and stuff but they're also very much the government's pet special force to take down resistance. then there was a fourth book "extras" where we see an even future-er future which addresses like a nosedive from black mirror kind of thing where the main character is trying to gain subscribers from livestreaming, as does everyone on the planet, to move up the social rankings, and she meets tally who's now like 30 and still a special. it was an interesting take on how trying to take out the system from the inside can sometimes... make you the system, and even when the old is destroyed, what comes next might not be any better
this movie is talking about people only a year older than i am.. why dont i look like them? do i need to wait one year before i magically transform into joey king?
My favorite book series growing up and I hope that a movie being made means that people will Not watch it and will instead read the book series. If they're young because adults won't digest it as well. This series was formative for me and my interests. It turned me into a nerd before it was socially acceptable to be one. I also own the supplemental book by Scott Westerfeld detailing how he based food tech (in Extras) and nanobots and all of the worldbuilding aspects on the tech and research of [a couple decades ago].
Oh my God I forgot about the extra book! I've still got them all somewhere! I remember when Hunger Games movies came out and thinking "damn that could have been us". No hate to Hunger Games, haven't seen the films but the books were great! It's annoying that they didn't do a better job with the Uglies film considering the novels came out before Hunger Games did - but the comparison is inevitable in the genre tbh. I'm basically saying a lot of nothing. I just loved the series
The books probably didn’t age perfectly since they came out like 20 years ago, but they were actually pretty unique at the time. They predated almost all of the other most popular YA dystopian fiction series like Hunger Games, Divergent, Maze Runner, etc by multiple years, so they weren’t just a knockoff of those series. They were just the last one to get a film/tv adaptation, apparently. Scott Westerfeld also wrote the most absurd and least serious vampire/zombie novel I’ve ever read. It’s called Peeps, and the vampire/zombie illness is just a different strain of toxoplasmosis, so cat owners become these cannibalistic creatures at higher rates. The Peeps can be repelled by exposing them to familiar things, like playing them their favorite music or showing them their old photos. It’s so ridiculous, I kinda loved it lol! I feel like that would have made for a much more interesting film. 💀
Also it’s only New Pretties that don’t have to have jobs. They live in a very idyllic city where they get opulent mansions and don’t have to do anything but party because that makes the Uglies more likely to want the surgery. Middle Pretties (people who are in their late 20s) choose jobs, are moved to the Suburbs, have kids, and get a second surgery to give them a more mature appearance. The surgery can also alter their brains further if their chosen job requires more critical thinking skills, intelligence, creativity, etc.
What great dystopian stories portrait well and very realistic is how they show the hierarchy and how the higher ups are not brainwashed, but incredibly intelligent and aware of the situation. 1984 and A brave new world.
Orr i wanna say i absolutely love your videos and hearing Sleeping on Trains at the end of your videos is an absolute treat every time, but i do wonder just how many of your fans know that James made that song
i didn't read this series when it came out because i was such a hipster ass tween i was like "lol that's dumb why would i read a whole book series when there's a Twilight Zone episode that does it better in 20 minutes" in hindsight its a miracle i was never wedgied by my peers
This made me so sad bc the book is sooo good but the movie is genuinely so bad it misses all the important parts of the book and the pacing is off and it erased all the tension the book created
@@SpoopySquid Anime usually come out as almost a 1 to 1 copy of the manga honestly. Anime fans are actually quite lucky when it comes to adaptations. Of course there's always some bad ones, though.. like Berserk, or the animation in So I'm a Spider, so What? being ruined because whatever company the studio outsourced to clearly scammed them. Or the recent Blue Lock situation, or what they did to poor, poor Promised Neverland season 2. And Uzumaki got screwed over too... off the top of my head these are all the screwed up adaptations I can think of but I'm sure there's more.
It's as if everyone on the internet has forgotten McG was quite a famous director back in the day, with both Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle and Terminator: Salvation under his belt.
So they wanted a movie about unattractive characters...so they picked Joey King who's been considered one of the cutest actresses in Hollywood for about 7 or 8 years now.
I love how this movie does kinda say "actually we should give people brain surgery and remove their personality". I really hoped we wouldn't get to this level of stupid, but here we are.
Its wild that i still don't really get why they're rebelling. Like... what is the actual problem with the pretty side? Vague reversalble brain damage that doesn't affect memory (since everyone still remembers their 'ugly' friends after yaasification)? Maybe I'll check out the book since it apparently does it well.
The book series is amazing, re-read it after reading it when I was 13, now 22. Still just as captivated by it and read each book in one night 😅. it sets up some really nice mysteries without being so godamn obvious, has some nice payoffs. Crying shame what they did to it. Specials (third one, technically not the end of the series, but the main story ends there) has to be my favourite book of all time still. Would recommend it highly.
my mother told me about this movie and the first thing i said was that it was literally the plot of the uglydolls movie. like exactly. despite having a soft spot for the uglydolls movie i did not, in fact, watch this one.
Raise your hand if you have personally been victimized by the film industry because they destroy X, Y, Z from your childhood? I wish movie making companies would stop taking book series and ruining them. Do they not have original thoughts over in Hollywood anymore? (I understand that some game series and comic books have also probably been ruined, but I don't know enough to be sure.)
24:46 I figured they were gonna do the whole “I vouched for you 😢” bit but my god I don’t think I’ve ever seen such on the nose writing as shoehorning in an “I vouched for her” line lmao
i in fact LOVED the books as a kid and now i'm questioning if they were actually any good lol bc aside from no one being ugly it's pretty faithful to the plot
I might be a little bit older than the usual demographic here, but Uglies was at least popular before Hunger Games if not totally out first, and my friends and I were obsessed with the series in middle school. I read it over and over and over. From my memory much better than Hunger Games (to be fair I haven’t read either in probably 15 years.) It’s such a bummer they wrecked an amazing book with this movie.
The book was definitely still corny but it also was obviously much better than this adaptation makes it seem. It definitely doesnt hold all the way up, but the movie really made an already corny thing all the way into a corndog. This video actually perfectly encapsulated why i hated the movie, as someone who has read the book.
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Will check it out, seems like a very neat tool
You do know this show is incredibly faithful to the book....lol
this is a sick sponsor
I swear netflix only made it so that people would be like "this is just a worse version of the hunger games... the hunger games were good lets rewatch them..on netflix"
Oh my god you're a genius
Based on Netflix’s business model as of late, I 100% could see this being the case…
That might be true if The Hunger Games was actually on Netflix.
@@stretchmonsterDepends where you live
Yeah tbh I wouldn't be surprised if some marketing director noticed that bad movies tend to get a lot of free advertising on youtube and this is essentially cinematic clickbait/ragebait
"Rusties" made me laugh really hard because it just sounds like Rusteez, the sponsor of famed racing car Lightning McQueen.
I too thought of cars when they said that
Same universe.
@@aj7058 Before or after Cars?
@@williamcrandall beforeafter it’s cyclical
And I get the sinking suspicion that the social commentary that is played for a joke in Cars about sponsorship and celebrity culture is much more interesting than in this movie lol
it would’ve been so easy to follow uncanny beauty, the symmetrical faces, Eurocentric features, lack of expression but no lets get sponsored by Snapchat’s makeup filter
I couldn't help but think about how insane the faces in the short film "Human Form" were. In ten minutes they made a way more compeling story, while perfectly showing the absurdirty of beauty standards.
That's the 2010s standard
@@thecolourfulpill Cassandra from Doctor Who shows the concept of 'pursuit of beauty gone too far' so well
I do understand that the point of the movie is that Beauty standards are arbitrary and change over time, and that in this distant future, what we consider to be beautiful today isn't beautiful anymore. But like... the Pretties look beautiful by 2020s standards. they fit OUR standards. The book made a big point of describing them in ways we'd find weird today. The theme doesnt work unless they look DISTINCTLY different from the uglies.
I'm reminded of an old black-and-white episode of "The Outer Limits".
There was a woman who was born with a disfigured face, which was concealed for most of the episode. The faces of the attending doctors and nurses were obscured by shadows. At the end of the episode, it was revealed that the main character looked like a beautiful woman, and everybody else had saggy, pig-like faces.
@@drewgoin8849 you're thinking of the Twilight Zone, actually, but still was a good episode with a good backstory
I KNOW I was looking forward to seeing how creatively they could interpret the book but it’s like they purposefully ignored the most interesting parts of the book
It's been years since I read the book (2009 or 2010 back in primary school). The main thing I remember is David telling Tally that she's not ugly and is actually attractive and I think Tally is the one who's harsh on her appearance but her flaws are all normal things.
Side note, I remember at the start of pretties, Tally gets injured and it leaves a small scar even as a pretty. And I feel like she had red hair or the cover of the book had red hair.
@@fadeuhhway yes! “beauty is in the eye of the beholder” good episode… much better executed than this movie lol
It's so frustrating that they entirely ignored the eugenics-y phrenological nature of the procedure and what makes a person "pretty" in the books. In the books, they go into each specific feature that different members of society are given to affect the "subconscious" ways others view them. They justify it by saying it's all based on science and this is why they are better than their predecessors. Also, it is explicitly said on multiple occasions in the books that the procedure makes everyone the same skin tone that is a nearly perfect middle of all human skin colors (so no one is super pale, no one is super dark, everyone is a sort of middle tan). This faulty "science" being used to justify eugenics and utilitarian power is gradually dismantled throughout the books through the eyes of Tally. I always worried that an adaptation would be near impossible due to this among other factors and this movie has proven that right.
The books were amazing! I always thought they would make great movies, but you have to keep the nuance! Especially disappointed with how the specials just looked regular 😢
@@ImARealCat Exactly! I have a lot of problems with this adaptation beyond just the visuals, but it would have been so neat if they'd really leaned into making the pretties uncannily unnaturally beautiful and the specials that terrifying beauty that makes your skin crawl with ice. A combination of practical effects makeup and CGI absolutely could have achieved this. The specials need to look unnatural and unnerving, not just like some chad with contact lenses.
Yuppp. I always thought it was interesting that there were other, much more unusual beauty standards for specific groups, like the Specials. The Specials are designed to look more frightening (in addition to their increased strength and stuff) since that makes them a more intimidating police force.
Y’know I always hopes Westerfelds books got some movies until this happened, now I’m really worried about what could happen
This is why you should never hope that media you like gets adapted to film or tv :D
But anyway, who's Tally? Are you talking about hit YA protagonist Squint?
its a shame because i remember enjoying this series when i read it as a kid. pretty sure the 'uglies' are supposed to be normal people like us, their society has just gotten to a point where even todays beauty standards aren't enough. 'pretties' were described as being beyond comprehension in their beauty iirc
I read the series while working as an assistant at a school library. I thought it was pretty interesting, and liked that it considered some important themes, especially for its audience. From the video responses I’ve seen (I’m not watching the movie, hah), the adaptation barely follows the plot of the book, like a weird fan fiction vaguely based on the characters and world. Oh well! Glad you enjoyed the books!
I know that Hollywood typically fucks up YA book -> movie adaptations, but this is egregious. I read this series throughout middle school as they were coming out and loved them! A key note is that they were coming out on the front end of the dystopian YA lit bubble, so while the genre is a bit played out after a couple of decades, the concept of Uglies was novel at the time.
With the point of the uglies not being ugly, instead of changing those actors they should have turned the uncanny beauty of the pretties up to 11. The casting director was right about one of the themes of the book being that the uglies aren’t actually ugly, but the lack of contrast kills the theme.
Yep when there’s cgi involved you can tell there’s loads of it and plus they will be there for the rest of their lives going through treatments to remain vein .
Ah yes, there's no history or stereotypes that could make focusing on a character's ugly nose feel charged or problematic in any way...nope...
The whole book is about this, go read it!
What are referencing? I'm lost 😅
@@awkwardotter13 Jews having crook noses is a big stereotype in antisemetic circles, and they love depicting them with exaggeratedly ugly noses.
@@awkwardotter13antisemitism
would you say the same for "squint" or is just a big nose problematic? sincerely, a heavily-bullied big-nosed not-Jewish person
"*dramatic pause* I'm David." Is totally giving the "I am Steve" from the Minecraft movie trailer
The love triangle with David feels so forced, Shay actually seems like she's deeply in love with Tally
That’s how I felt when revisiting the books as an adult
Oh yeah give me some of that teen lesbian tension. When i reread the Hunger games i also had the impression Madge had a thing for Katniss but i bet the director realized this and removed Madge from the movie... good look trying to adapt who gave Katniss the mockingjay pin bc it sure will be a prominent topic in the upcoming THG book
"my story today... began in the past"??? what in the ChatGPT?
nah bro our ai overlords arent that braindead...maybe we should be pushing for chatgpt dialogue instead :D
i mean a story can begin in the past but be ongoing today that's fine that's a thing that happens
It's saying very little, not quite pretentiously.
@@ilexdiapason you might even say that THIS IS IS HOW EVERY STORY GOES, UNDER CAUSALITY
@@andrewkoster6506 ...no? There's stories about the future. Also time travel stories. I'll grant you *most* stories begin in the past but not all.
tally x shay has tragic yuri potential
exactly
Honestly I was kinda blindsided by Shay not being part of the very-obviously-set-up love triangle, like "ok, so the contrasting love interests are Nose and Shay, pretty standard character archetypes but neat to see some queer rep- wait, she's not a love interest?"
I remember reading this book series when I was younger and I know there's a whole thing of "movies based on books are worse!" but I really think that this book series was better as a book series and shouldn't have been adapted. The concept of "it'll never be enough" and "don't judge others for looking different" really sits better when the reader can imagine their own perceived "flaws" onto the main character instead of being shown a character that they have no tie to and may not have the same "flaws" as the viewer
"My story begins in the past." Such a refreshing change from all those other stories that start in the future.
..in all fairness, stories that start in the future are often the best stories out there. The mind bending time shenanigans always go hard
God, this makes me so sad. This was a great, great book series. It was genuinely creative and unique!! But the movie did it DIRTY
"genuinely"
Could you say the book was beautiful and the movie was....not beautiful? Almost as if it was, dare I say...disgusting? No...the fuck was that word I'm looking for...
Fuck!
@@ThootenTootinTabootin””genuinely””
Im pretty sure this was literally the plot of a Twilight Zone episode. Except that story had actual tension and a chilling dystopian ending.
It's a 4 book series about a revolution within a dystopia, I think it gets more in depth than a twilight zone ep
@@nari5161 The book series might but a 2-3hr live action movie can easily be less deep than a twilight zone episode, or a 4 book series.
@@midnight4685 I think the book idea came from the Twilight Zone episode. Esp since the pig mask Tally picks up in book 1 is a direct reference to it
It is
Fairly Odd Parents tore this idea apart years ago - Timmy wishes for everyone to be identical grey blobs, but then they are still bullying each other for not being "As" grey or blobby as the in-crowd. Even if everyone is identical, they'll FIND things to be shit about.
Exactly. To begin with we're already an incredibly homogenous species. And we still find ways to hate each other.
Yeah. Also beauty is entirely subjective, I know people who find being overweight attractive. I know people who find the elderly attractive. If this whole thing is going to work you're going to need to forcefully modify everyone's brains to have the same standards of beauty and if you're doing that you may as well just skip the beauty stuff and change their brains to be more cooperative and less tribalistic.
I guess what I'm saying is, mind control is awesome and I can't wait for it!
I still think the movie should've been a wlw between tally and shay. I think id be more tolerable than what was forced with David 🙁
You're onto something because Tally/Shay drives the book plot through Specials (3rd out of 4 books, 4th book is a later timeline different characters) but the David part is extremely vital plot-wise. It's not wlw though, or if so one-directional. Don't watch the movies
REAL I was thinking the exact same thing when reading the book. If you haven’t read it, I’d recommend it:3
Me tooooo! I hated how forced Tally and David’s relationship was 😭
1000%
i expected that 😢
i will NEVER EVER stop YAPPING and DROOLING over his cardboard backgrounds, honestly they make me SO happy, super creative and cute. id love to watch a show with shit like that. May actually make a project using those kinds of cardboard backgrounds since I think theyre so cool!
I met Orr irl
He stole my bf and broke both my kneecaps then he proceeded to emote on my screaming husk of a body..
10/10 experience will recommend 👍💯🔥
omg how do I make this happen to me!??!?!
@hyunjinsanity I manifested him by watching a Trisha paytas podcast
evil pinely would never do this, unless he's in front of a worse backdrop
i think you met evil pinely, orrs evil twin brother
did you live?
Me: "Oh, a Pinely upload."
Friend: "THE Pinely?"
Count Pinely
this is like the hundredth uglies video I've watched and i still get entertained every single time
I haven’t even watched the movie and don’t plant to, but keep watching the videos about it lol
@@mayrasouza1555sometimes i think im stupid for watching movie reviews om movies I'll never watch, glad I'm not the only one who does this😂
me because i have autism
Laverne Cox's performance was by far the best part if this entire dumpster fire. I would love to see her in similar roles that are actually well written, she would be an iconic villain.
She’s so so good in literally everything she’s in
i think in the book, the necklace is destroyed by like. a rock. which is at least slightly more reasonable. also the way they take the cure is DEFINITELY not in the book, i think they just know someone who figures out the formula. i read it in middle school & am in my late twenties now, so who knows. i just remember that 90% of the reason i read the trilogy because it felt like tally & shay had some sort of red string of fate thing going on where they were constantly forced on opposite sides just by virtue of the politics of the world around them. baby's first tragic lesbian romance. i DO remember tally being like, incredibly desperate about being pretty in the book. like it felt like she thought her life was over because she couldn't get the surgery
The premises of these dystopias just keep getting sillier. What's next, a civilization revolving around how good you are at parkour?
Don't give Netflix any ideas
ironically, parkour civilization has a much more intriguing plot line and better storytelling than most netflix movies
funnily enough, that's pretty much the premise of Divergent
here in parkour civilization, no one chooses to jump for the beef. it's better to be safe and do the one block jump for the chicken rather than risk your entire life.
@@sockjok_animations1638That was my thought. Their entire civilization was basically taken over because one faction was really good at parkour.
I always forget that people outside the KPop community were also subjected to the horrors of Oli London 😭😭😭
They don't use actual teens bc they don't want to deal with child labor laws lmao
he means its not that hard to get actors in their early 20s that look like teens. no one expects actual teenagers playing teenagers, just for them not to look 35
18-19 is no longer a child and will look a lot closer to the character's supposed age than someone in their 30s.
13:05 the joke is that in a movie full of teenagers in their late 20s, Pinely's supposed 'grandmother' does not look much older than that.
Makes me feel old. 😂
Why the hunks always have stupid names 😭
Peeta and Gale are passable, they’re sorta cute. But Four? Nose? Like wtf what happened to Matthew, Johnny, I’d even take a Chad 😭
Shoutout to the immortal instruments for breaking the generational trauma, everyone’s got normal and/or cool names there
well weird names are meant to communicate the teen dystopia thing, to show the differences in their society and ours. in the books, david is a weird name to them
@@_edenfalls I mean, that's a good explanation, but no one forced these authors to name their hunks "Four" and "Nose" 😭
They could have cool different names. Katniss, Effie and Haymitch are cool and sorta weird names that don't really sound like any modern culture. Yet I think naming a character, and a lead at that, something downright stupid takes away from the suspension of disbelief, makes it hard to take the character and story seriously.
I'm so distracted by your library book titles.
_"I was a work shy city train"_ ?
In particular is mesmerising.
i read it as "i want a more uniform train"
Perhaps purchases for his video on Amazon's AI-written books?
26:16 You clearly didn't take classes on how to treat deep wounds in middle school. It's also pretty safe to say that you also skipped the classes on free-soloing huge mountains.
I feel like being good at everything with very little explanation is just the chosen one trope, which usually has to do with Jungian/Campbellian reasons. It’s just that these movies don’t do much else with that framework beyond a very basic hero’s journey. Which isn’t necessarily the worst thing. Stories can be simple. I think there is a lot to be desired in execution though. At least in the movies. Usually books are better at this.
Exactly a good movie doesn't have to be over complicated but these dull movies these streaming platforms(especially Netflix) keep releasing are just to mediocre.
a poorly done chosen one trope, paul atreides anakin/luke skywalker all do it well more so anakin and paul though
this was actually a book that was before hunger games
The book was quite good tbh
You couldn’t wait 56 second of the video
most of the people watching these films didnt even know they were books and if they did it was justa quick look on wikipedia
This concept is just "what if South Korea was real"
the implication here that south Korea isn't real....????
@@themischief420South Korea is a societal concept, hope that helps
"Uglies", unlike "Alien Cake", is no masterpiece.
“This story starts… in the past”. Yeah no sh!t! That’s how stories work though.
Lines like that are how you know you're in for a good time
i mean stories are either in medias res meaning they start in the past, or they're not, meaning they start in the present - a lot of stories begin with the first thing happening rather than "(record scratch) yup that's me"
ayy knew that this would be about Uglies as soon as I got the notification; my dad got me to watch this with him and once he fell asleep i didn’t bother to finish it, wasn’t different or interesting enough to care, all it had was a couple pretty scenes tbh. definitely a ‘screensaver’ movie
I like that expression!
It's absolute lunacy someone developed this script, Netflix approved it, people filmed it and they all looked at the premise and said "yes, good, this is great" at every point of the process
Listening to A Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, and goddamn- It's making me appreciate the hunger games so much more, and how none of the other "teen dystopias" was nearly as good.
Tribute nation lesgooo
I didn’t know there was going to be a new Hunger Games book next year until a few days ago and legit got excited as a nearly 40 year old man. Hunger Games was definitely the best of all these. Maze Runner is a close second though. Then a GIANT PRECIPICE to all the rest of them.
The cgi in this movie is giving spy kids
Random comment but I just have to shout out my fav horrible ADR over a crowd scene EVER, which also just happens to be a teen dystopian, and that's in episode one of the 100 when Octavia runs forward and someone shouts clear as a bell "that's the girl they found in the floor!" Thank you for the exposition random bystander lmao.
im so early, i have watched like 10 videos of uglies but ill eat it up every time, especially from pinely
Alex Meyers, Elvis, art at midnight's video,...
Where can I get my Pine Library card from?
It’s literally like the joke about the teen dystopia where dental hygiene is banned but beauty
Complete with a toothbrush pill!
Man. McG's directing career has really gone downhill since directing Smash Mouth's All Star music video
it's okay Scott westerfeld fans. we're getting a leviathan anime and we just have to pray it's good
The fact that they seemingly rebel because they are treated worse for being ugly when all of them can literally wait like 1 year and get a free surgery to solve the dividing issue of the distopia is what gets me.
The point of the book series is to highllight how beauty standards are arbitrary, and keeps changing. It's a critique of social media, model industries and body image. It's a world that doesn't care about diversity or identity.
The rebellion is not "wah, we are ugly and no one loves us" but "we don't want a world where everyone is forced into one mold by eugenic mindsets."
@Peregrina well, the synopsis of the movie based on that book sure did lose something in translation
I love that in the heist bit the wife also wears a ski mask for absolutely no reason
From what I remember when I read the books over a decade ago, the “Pretties” are supposed to basically look AI generated.
I hate that they didn’t even try to nail that “beautifully uncanny” look😒 it’s not like Netflix doesn’t have the budget for it
I thought this was Evil Pinely but then I realized it was just Pinely and the real evil is Pinely’s grandma
I don't fully understand the difference between Pinely and Evil Pinely. Who is the first channel? Who is the second? I don't know 🌈
I'm an indie self-published author and stories like me upset me so damn much. Like sure I would love to have work adapted, but like it just feels like no one cared about the story and only cared about the money. Can we start writing movies for the story PLEASE?
Omfg the cooking mama sounds effects xD
as someone who read and enjoyed the books as a teen i hate this stupid movie so much because the book actually had something to say and the movie couldn't have been made by anyone who cared less about the source material
the original trilogy goes uglies -> pretties -> specials, where tally becomes increasingly coopted by the government's promises of easy beauty and turned into something that's less and less of a person - the specials have crazy tiger fangs and stuff but they're also very much the government's pet special force to take down resistance. then there was a fourth book "extras" where we see an even future-er future which addresses like a nosedive from black mirror kind of thing where the main character is trying to gain subscribers from livestreaming, as does everyone on the planet, to move up the social rankings, and she meets tally who's now like 30 and still a special. it was an interesting take on how trying to take out the system from the inside can sometimes... make you the system, and even when the old is destroyed, what comes next might not be any better
this movie is talking about people only a year older than i am.. why dont i look like them? do i need to wait one year before i magically transform into joey king?
19:33 its also mirrored 💀💀 great job editors ya fucked it
So they don't get auto copyright claimed
My favorite book series growing up and I hope that a movie being made means that people will Not watch it and will instead read the book series. If they're young because adults won't digest it as well. This series was formative for me and my interests. It turned me into a nerd before it was socially acceptable to be one. I also own the supplemental book by Scott Westerfeld detailing how he based food tech (in Extras) and nanobots and all of the worldbuilding aspects on the tech and research of [a couple decades ago].
Oh my God I forgot about the extra book! I've still got them all somewhere!
I remember when Hunger Games movies came out and thinking "damn that could have been us".
No hate to Hunger Games, haven't seen the films but the books were great!
It's annoying that they didn't do a better job with the Uglies film considering the novels came out before Hunger Games did - but the comparison is inevitable in the genre tbh.
I'm basically saying a lot of nothing. I just loved the series
The books probably didn’t age perfectly since they came out like 20 years ago, but they were actually pretty unique at the time. They predated almost all of the other most popular YA dystopian fiction series like Hunger Games, Divergent, Maze Runner, etc by multiple years, so they weren’t just a knockoff of those series. They were just the last one to get a film/tv adaptation, apparently.
Scott Westerfeld also wrote the most absurd and least serious vampire/zombie novel I’ve ever read. It’s called Peeps, and the vampire/zombie illness is just a different strain of toxoplasmosis, so cat owners become these cannibalistic creatures at higher rates. The Peeps can be repelled by exposing them to familiar things, like playing them their favorite music or showing them their old photos. It’s so ridiculous, I kinda loved it lol! I feel like that would have made for a much more interesting film. 💀
Also it’s only New Pretties that don’t have to have jobs. They live in a very idyllic city where they get opulent mansions and don’t have to do anything but party because that makes the Uglies more likely to want the surgery.
Middle Pretties (people who are in their late 20s) choose jobs, are moved to the Suburbs, have kids, and get a second surgery to give them a more mature appearance. The surgery can also alter their brains further if their chosen job requires more critical thinking skills, intelligence, creativity, etc.
What great dystopian stories portrait well and very realistic is how they show the hierarchy and how the higher ups are not brainwashed, but incredibly intelligent and aware of the situation.
1984 and A brave new world.
Orr i wanna say i absolutely love your videos and hearing Sleeping on Trains at the end of your videos is an absolute treat every time, but i do wonder just how many of your fans know that James made that song
Laverne Cox is such an icon. Her performance is the movie's only redeeming quality
Ouch! That opening line hurts.
Okay I need you to do reviews like this for every movie ever. I feel like I've seen this movie minute by minute
i remember reading uglies in like 5th grade and even back then i didn't understand how the whole mimic worked.
Can't believe they made a movie about getting human pack a punched at 16
5:24 idk think about how much is spent in travel alone when it comes to plastic surgery
i didn't read this series when it came out because i was such a hipster ass tween i was like "lol that's dumb why would i read a whole book series when there's a Twilight Zone episode that does it better in 20 minutes"
in hindsight its a miracle i was never wedgied by my peers
"my story today, starts in the past"
YEAH NO DUH, THAT'S HOW STORIES USUALLY WORK.
3 sec in and I liked already bc man this intro... ah, Pinely, my love (in a kind of parasocial but very platonic way)
This made me so sad bc the book is sooo good but the movie is genuinely so bad it misses all the important parts of the book and the pacing is off and it erased all the tension the book created
I read the books in 8th grade and loved it. I looked at the poster for the movie and immediately got sad that it was gonna suck
i stopped listening to fiona apple for this 😇 (very excited)
High praise ❤
Now that is a name I haven't heard in a long time.
Idk if the backgrounds are new or what but they add to the video so much!!!
but the books were so good, i re-read them a lot as a teenager :( slander from Netflix
Anime fans: First time?
@@SpoopySquid Anime usually come out as almost a 1 to 1 copy of the manga honestly. Anime fans are actually quite lucky when it comes to adaptations.
Of course there's always some bad ones, though.. like Berserk, or the animation in So I'm a Spider, so What? being ruined because whatever company the studio outsourced to clearly scammed them. Or the recent Blue Lock situation, or what they did to poor, poor Promised Neverland season 2.
And Uzumaki got screwed over too... off the top of my head these are all the screwed up adaptations I can think of but I'm sure there's more.
It's as if everyone on the internet has forgotten McG was quite a famous director back in the day, with both Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle and Terminator: Salvation under his belt.
So they wanted a movie about unattractive characters...so they picked Joey King who's been considered one of the cutest actresses in Hollywood for about 7 or 8 years now.
Ruffle shirt Pinely is making me Feel Things.
Also having the shallow, pro-conformity, looks-obsessed leader be played by a trans woman was. A choice.
6:47 adskip
I love how this movie does kinda say "actually we should give people brain surgery and remove their personality". I really hoped we wouldn't get to this level of stupid, but here we are.
Its wild that i still don't really get why they're rebelling. Like... what is the actual problem with the pretty side? Vague reversalble brain damage that doesn't affect memory (since everyone still remembers their 'ugly' friends after yaasification)? Maybe I'll check out the book since it apparently does it well.
The book series is amazing, re-read it after reading it when I was 13, now 22. Still just as captivated by it and read each book in one night 😅. it sets up some really nice mysteries without being so godamn obvious, has some nice payoffs. Crying shame what they did to it. Specials (third one, technically not the end of the series, but the main story ends there) has to be my favourite book of all time still. Would recommend it highly.
typical flashbang necklace... single use, soo..
my mother told me about this movie and the first thing i said was that it was literally the plot of the uglydolls movie. like exactly. despite having a soft spot for the uglydolls movie i did not, in fact, watch this one.
The Uglydolls movie rules unironically
Raise your hand if you have personally been victimized by the film industry because they destroy X, Y, Z from your childhood?
I wish movie making companies would stop taking book series and ruining them. Do they not have original thoughts over in Hollywood anymore? (I understand that some game series and comic books have also probably been ruined, but I don't know enough to be sure.)
The Uglies was an option for assigned summer reading going into 8th grade in my school district and I hate to say I chose it
aww his top is slaying
Wait, the same McG that worked on Supernatural??? That's wild
Linepy is back!
"This is an incredibly experimental movie that dares to break Hollywood's show-don't-tell rule" 😂
24:46 I figured they were gonna do the whole “I vouched for you 😢” bit but my god I don’t think I’ve ever seen such on the nose writing as shoehorning in an “I vouched for her” line lmao
Subscribed, gotta make memaw proud!
I really thought I was already subscribed since I been watching your stuff a bit. Almost wonder if it unsubbed me.
i in fact LOVED the books as a kid and now i'm questioning if they were actually any good lol bc aside from no one being ugly it's pretty faithful to the plot
I might be a little bit older than the usual demographic here, but Uglies was at least popular before Hunger Games if not totally out first, and my friends and I were obsessed with the series in middle school. I read it over and over and over. From my memory much better than Hunger Games (to be fair I haven’t read either in probably 15 years.) It’s such a bummer they wrecked an amazing book with this movie.
im sorry but the hunger games writing and plot beats uglies by miles, uglies just happened to be published earlier
The book was definitely still corny but it also was obviously much better than this adaptation makes it seem. It definitely doesnt hold all the way up, but the movie really made an already corny thing all the way into a corndog. This video actually perfectly encapsulated why i hated the movie, as someone who has read the book.
Don't worry Pinely, next week your grandma will finally be proud of your 600k subscribers
My mom needed a name for a little pine tree she had, I knew exactly what to recommend.
3:40 missed opportunity to call them mudknights
if you're reading this comment before the video is 33 minutes old, what are you doing? go watch the video, its great
What are you doing writing this comment? Shouldn’t you be watching the video?
Ok
I don't watch my videos, they watch me
Take your own advice
32 MINUTES ALMOST
Joey King really has a type both for movie quality and role she plays, doesn't she?
ive only awtched til 8:25 but what im getting so far is that this movie is uglydolls but human