they didn't make the "Pretties" grotesque enough, the main bit of the book i remember was Tally finds this old magazine and is looking at a picture of a supermodel and is disgusted, like how she feels looking at all the other Uglies, and she says the model is almost "Pretty" but not quite - the Pretties have huge eyes and tiny noses etc, and as a 12 year old this made a huge impact about how beauty standards are completely manufactured and totally dependent on your upbringing etc
I 100% agree!! That portion of the book has always stuck with me too for the same reason. I always hoped if they made a movie adaptation, they would use that as direction and confirmation that the Pretties don't look anything like what we currently deem attractive in our world, because that's the whole point!
I never read the books or heard of it before but this is immediately what i thought when I heard the concept, and when I saw the clips of the movie I was like huh did I miss something 😅
I was watching LavenderTown's video on this movie and she made that point too, and compared the look they should have gone for to Alita Battle Angel which I thought was a good reference point. Very uncanny valley
There's a twilight zone episode that does this concept super well called Eye of the Beholder. Definitely recommend giving it a watch if u have the time
imagine being one of the people in a dystopian universe that has a normal name and an average life. you're the kid named steve, trying to get through the 4th exposition assembly of the week, and it keeps getting interrupted by a girl named Chartreuse driving her motorcycle back from the Saving Human Rights Club
There's a book kind of like that called 'the rest of us just live here' by patrick ness. It's about this kind of perks of being a wallflowery friend group just trying to enjoy their last year of highschool and going through real world problems (mental health issues, break-ups, parents divorce, career choices,...) and every chapter has one paragraph about what the 'indie kids' i.e. the usual main characters named things like finn or sage are doing to save the world (like the school explodes and there's wars between gods and stuff).
it is so crazy to hear you say "i was kinda hoping they did a blood pact" because they LITERALLY DID IN THE BOOK. i barely remember this book and i do not believe i finished it, but i distinctly remember the main character describing how she and her friend made a blood pact to be friends forever, and/or to make themselves "blood siblings" or whatever. that is EXACTLY what they did, and i feel like changing it makes the matching scars way more hollow?? like i'm not gonna get all sentimental about the time you broke my ipad, dude
Nose was so funny because they made Chase wear a prosthetic nose but they didn’t put one on the actor that played him as a kid so he had like a perfectly straight, normal sized nose
@@bashfulnathRIGHT!! Like only ONE person in Hollywood (Anya Taylor Joy, who slays) could have been WORSE for that description 😭😭 “Omg I can't wait to stop being all squinty”… No one in this movie has wider eyes than you ma'am calm down 🙂↕️ I'm okay with the whole “normal human face = ugly” narrative, sure. But WHAT?!?!
OKAY FINALLY SOMEONE TALKED ABOUT THE BIRTHDAY ASSEMBLIES. It actually bothered me so so much, in no world does it make sense. They give so much exposition but it still doesn't make ANY sense
@@AnotherTurning yeah and how every horse in each hemisphere has the same birthday. I also would have accepted that they're grown in tubes or have scheduled surrogacy births or whatever bc Future
I think the book came out when the plot was actually interesting. Early 20s we didnt have much self image love for teenage girls. The first book came out before Hunger Games and it felt very different at the time. But in 2024, we've had the body positivity movement. We've had the dystopian teenager will save the world and there's a love triangle trend. It feels like this movie came out 15 years too late
Yes, it came out in 2005! I think it was so wildly ahead of its time. I think there’s a way they could have made it work but not as a shitty Netflix movie
This whole series was such a bonding experience for my mom and I. The idea of these unnaturally beautiful people, and being so ingrained in your own image of beauty that you flinch at normal aging. It’s still relevant, but if it had come out alongside something like Botched, it would have been much more timely
There's a Korean movie with a similar concept but it's executed a lot better because everyone literally looks the same. Not human same though. They all look like paper or plastic dolls. So the audience can't even be like, "well the protagonist is prettier than the definition of pretty" or whatever. Like they're not yassified, they're literally....dolls. Lemme find the name of the movie *Edit:* Human Form is the name of the movie I'm talking about
Something else about this movie - one of the producers (Joey King's manager), Dan Spilo, was ejected from Survivor season 39 for groping contestants and crew members. This was 5 years ago.
Ive gone back to this comment like five times during this video, i dont know what short of string you pulled in my brain but i cant stop thinking about it
Exactly. I get the character was called squint in the book, but like, give her a new nickname for the movie. Especially since as a pretty her eyes became smaller.
@@audrey9609it did feel a little insane to call a white girl that but I’m also white so idk 😭😭I grew up around a lot of horrible people so it immediately felt offensive to me but maybe other people don’t think of it that way 😭 I hope that’s not weird to say, sorry, the movie has bigger problems obviously lol
0:38 If The Uglies actually caused the demise of Woody Allen, I would never shut up or stop singing its praises. I would single-handedly manage a winning Oscar campaign for it.
In the book's mild defence, it takes Tally a few weeks to reach the Smoke, so it's a little more believable Shay and David are a things. There's a whole thing about how she just grabbed a bunch of the MREs Cable gives her, but doesn't understand the lable and only taking spaghetti Bolognese for her whole trip and she hates it by the end.
THANK YOU! I was cracking up at that bit, because Westerfield does such a good job of making you FEEL just how long it takes Tally to navigate to the Smoke. Its the most memorable part of the first book for me.
i read the uglies series like 15 years ago or something and i barely remember the details, but i DO remember one of the leading guys in a sequel was described to get the pretty surgery to look like a bishie anime boy. the book describes him with "anime-like" features. i was a full on weeaboo at the time and thought that was awesome to include, but now it kind of sounds terrifying considering the melty features of 2005 era bishie anime boys. also one of the girls (maybe shay?) had eye replacements that had ticking clocks in them and they had fake cigarettes dispensed from their materializer wall for the party they were going to, i remember it specifying fake ones which was very funny conceptually. the cosmetic descriptions in the books were very fun all things considered.
I have never forgotten about the Extras guy who enables “full honesty brain mode” and can’t lie or deceive other people in any way 😭 what a wild thing to voluntarily do to yourself
That description is etched into my brain; it was the moment I was like "whoa...yeah, those giant-ass eyes would be in the DEPTHS of the uncanny valley in real life..."
@@cam4636I swear to god in specials they also describe people who turn themselves into aliens, and MAKE THEIR EYES EVEN BIGGER? Like is it just half of their skull at that point?
@@addyshorhnr3544I think that was in Extras, they literally gave themselves prehensile toes and wore zero gravity boots to prepare themselves to launch into orbit 😂
as an autistic girlie, I appreciate how little eye contact you make. totally serious, all these youtubers who stare at the camera dead on for minutes on end make me stressed lmao
A few years ago Scott Westerfeld released a follow-up series to the original Uglies trilogy (+ Extras) called Imposters. It’s set in the future of the same universe and explores what happens when the world wakes up from being pretty, I loved it! For the love of god please review the books bc yes this movie was ass x
@@hockeygrrlmuse Imposters shows us what the world ended up doing with 10 whole years post mind-rain. You see what methods the cities end up using to govern themselves, the technologies that people developed, and the horrific consequences that some of this freedom came with. In the words of Dr Cable, freedom has a way of destroying things. 110% think you’d enjoy the read if you liked Extras!
That first minute life update was unexpectedly relatable, she said on her fourth 50min "before bed" video , even though they specifically came home to sleep cause they've barely slept all week
I've seen people defend them choosing conventionally attractive people to play the Uglies because, like you said, the idea behind it is that the beauty standards are so high that everyone is ugly. But to me it just kind of feels like the movie is trying to say: "isn't it dystopian that in this world even the PRETTY people are UGLY? How terrible!" and that just doesn't seem compelling to me. I know there's a lot more going on with the worldbuilding, but that seems to be something that a lot of people are focusing on.
I think if the pretties looked AGGRESSIVELY altered and borderline inhuman to show how extreme the standards have become instead of just looking like instagram models with contact lenses and wigs on Like if the conventionally attractive people are labeled Ugly and the Pretty people all look psychotic thatd probably be more effective, but this movie was a disaster so it certainly wouldn’t have saved it lmao.
It's just like... The whole Bacteria in the oil thing doesn't make sense to me... We use oil because it burns well and we can use that to heat to transfer into energy. But if there's bacteria in it.... you can just burn the bacteria too...?????????
If the bacteria broke down the chemical bonds in the oil the oil wouldn't release the same amount of energy when burned. Or at least that's my understanding I did fail chemistry so I may be wildly wrong lol. There are some bacteria and insects that have adapted to consume plastics.
in the book it was different!!! in the book the flowers were hella rare and were worth money so people started selectively breeding them to grow better but then the flowers turned out to be hella invasive and destroyed the environment. thats why there was a fire, bc the smoke people were burning them to stop their growth
definitely needed a mean girl that was the assistant to cable who was pretty that was a b*tch and used their insecurities to insult them the typical Ryan Murphy way
YO!! This is so iconic to me right now because the only thing that I remember from reading the uglies when I was like 12 is the first line of the first book?? That part has been seared into my goddamn brain lol “the sky was the color of cat vomit“ like I’m sorry, that’s criminal 💀
I will stay on my soapbox! Uglies came out in 2005!! It's not a dystopian copy, it IS the dysoptian blueprint!! (and this movie is different from the book in a lot of strange ways)
@@ThatWeirdo04 They're talking about in the YA genre, in the same way that romance novels have been around for centuries but Twilight reshaped the YA romance.
I 100% agree! All of the tropes it falls into may seem bad from the present point of view but it was like the blueprint for modern YA dystopians. I loved these books so much
I wish they had dug into it, Hunger Games style. The surgeries in the book were unnerving. Waking up with different bones and skin, no longer being able to bruise, having all of your teeth removed. I also remember being really fascinated by the "middle" and "late" pretties. Aging is something that you go to a hospital to get done, to achieve a more age-appropriate look (i.e. while still looking young). So instead of getting to experience a lifetime of changes in your pretty body, you age maybe twice, artificially.
The consent thing was so weird in this film. Not giving her the cure after she's said several time before that she doesn't want the surgery is such a weird way to think. It's like having sex with a drugged person after they asked you to have sex with them in their drugged state even though you know very well that they wouldn't want that normally. Like, the only ethical action is to help them get to them back to normal
Exactly, Carly nailed how it feels really worrying to imply that certain kinds of incapacitation or damage strips someone of their autonomy/choice but like. Fiction is the perfect place to explore that concept!! We could've had an interesting little thought experiment about free will & informed consent without real-world stakes bc the Pretty surge/lesion thing isn't real. But no we can't have nuance in our YA movie
I don't think they make it obvious in the movie, but in the book it was really focused on the idea that this was an entirely untested cure made by one grieving woman in a makeshift lab in the ruins of an old city. And the way it worked was literally eating away the part of your brain with the lesions, so there was a chance it would eat more than the lesions and cause severe brain damage as a side effect. It wasn't the fact that this brain-altered shay didn't want the cure even though everyone knew normal shay would have, it was the fact that it is unethical to make this girl a medical test subject when she didn't have all the information beforehand and was now saying no. Also the book was written in 2005 which was a very different world as far as consent discourse
14:45 exactlyyyyyy! it had me really spiralling. i never read the books, so i was like "well maybe it's a krypton matrix situation and they don't have babies normally anymore? and they birth them in groups, so the assembly is only like once a month??" but nooo, i'm just overthinker xD
Oh great, Carley's here to rip on something I was wondering about but didn't care enough to commit to actually researching, great, perfect, there's my next hour planned
I was obsessedddd with these books at a teen, and I knew when they announced they were making a movie that it would be terrible 😭but bless u for covering it! Also completely normalized surgery for me. Like I was 8 and genuinely though I’d just *get* surgery at 18
Me: *gets lobotomised* “Hey we can we cure u off your lobotomy” Me: ‘No you can’t I like being lobotomised’ “Oh okay guess they don’t consent, nevermind then”
As a trans person, the fact that they chose a trans actor to play the supervillain who tricks children into getting surgery feels suuuuuuper icky. Like did nobody think of the optics here?!
@@lottiestewart8918 oh shit you're so right. I assumed Laverne wanted to put up a similar performance to Viola Davis in the Hunger Game prequel but that particular misinformation campaign is going HARD rn 😬
@@famewolf.mp4but whys it gotta be a message 😭 let transes be toxic and powerful lol. i bet transphobes think its propaganda that shes in the movie at all
@@princicatthat's a fair point! Transphobes will find a way to be transphobic anyway. and I should remember an actors jobs is to act, so why would I or anyone else equate the trans actor with the behaviour of a character they play. (Idk if this is coming off sarcastic I'm being genuine !)
my friend in 5th grade read these books, i never read them but as far as i remember from listening to her talk about them there’s no love triangle in the books. honestly it seems like maybe the books are more about girls being friends which is pretty nice
Glenn would totally fit in the Hunger Games because the word refers to something natural, and then she'd give him some whimsical last name like Clemmingtrap
Also, I remember reading about some of the names being pretty close to modern names (Peeta and Peter being the most obvious) meaning the language may have evolved over time
havent read the books since i was in middle school but i feel like in them the matching scar thing was from them actually do a blood pact carving their initials into each others palms thing so the ipad glass switch up is so bland like😭😭 why would you take interesting character development and make it so flat?
the same premise of Uglies was actually explored in a much more interesting way in the 1964 Twilight Zone episode "Number 12 Looks Just Like You." From IMDB: "In a future society, everyone must undergo an operation at age 19 to become beautiful and conform to society. Since her father [censor] after his surgery, 18-year-old Marilyn desperately wants to hold on to her identity." It's a short story that has something worth saying, which is a lot more than whatever we got with Uglies lol
it was !! i read this book at twelve and i remember thinking it was deep. then again, i didn't proceed to book two, so uh. maybe not *too* perfect. still, parts of it stuck with me, so it did something right
I am having my period rn and not in a good mental state. my grandma is sick, there are several wars going on and climat change is just fuzzing all around in my mind and i am balling my eyes out about it but this video calms me down a bit. Thank you
the plot of this reminds me of that one episode of the twilight zone where everyone has to get a surgery when they turn 18, and they have like 20 different options to choose from
17:00 is so real. like please let’s make real movies again! it’s concerning the amount of movies these days that keep explaining the lore in such an obvious and straightforward way.
i have insomnia and ur videos put me to sleep every night. there’s just something about your voice that knocks me out immediately. i love you so much for this. also your videos are NOT boring i also watch them when i’m not trying to sleep don’t worry ❤️❤️
I came to such a realization while I was listening to your video. I a mid 20 something year old, teach like 12 year olds dance. and they repeatedly think that I am 17/18 and realized that they think that besides my baby face, they also probably have really only been exposed to 17/18 year olds through media where twenty/thirty something year olds play teenagers
I think my main problem with this movie, is that I actually would like to just be yassified and completely oblivious to the worlds problems. This sounds like a fantasy more than a dystopian 😭
Essentially considering becoming pretty isn’t exclusive or a privilege, literally everyone gets to be pretty if they just make it to sixteen. Sure they aren’t nice to uglies but that will eventually stop. If the price of being pretty was really bad or only certain people could become pretty it would be much more compelling. They should have portrayed the world as a utopia and then a twist proves it to be a dystopia but nope💀
this is my time to speak of the birthday paradox: there's a 50% chance that in a group of 23 people, 2 of them share the same birthday. so 9 people out of 500 sharing a birthday is pretty sound
@@yeah5895the hunger games didn’t start the ya dystopia genre. it’s existed for a while but I think more ppl would say The Giver really popularized it, and that was published in the 90s I think
I feel like the whole premise does not make sense: beauty standards tend to reflect certain desirable traits (usually a combination of wealth, effort, youth, and health). If every adult looks like that, there is no reason for people to keep seeing them as beautiful.
first of all so sorry we’ve driven you to this place. unfortunately now i’m going to need you to unpack the horrors that ensue in every season of the vampire diaries.
I really enjoyed watching you take this apart. I've been on the fence about watching it. I read this series as a teenager and I remember it being so amazing and wonderful and it lit a little revolutionary fire under my butt early on. I wish you could review the entire book series. But this was fun!
15:20 you know what, statistically speaking it is actually a pretty known "paradox" in statistical mechanics, that in a group of N people people there's a high chance that at least two people share a birthday idk i just wanted to point that out it's a very fun concept :-)
The only good thing about this movie is that chase stokes looks exactly like my brother, and imagining my brother as yassified as a kardashian is the greatest thing to ever happen in my life
Btw, nowadays actors don't need to get surgery for cosmetic improvements. They can get their nose sculpted with hyaluronic acid. They can reduce or fill out the fat in their face using sculptra, and have many options for good looking skin. And of course, if you want to loose weight, there are pills for that. I fear we might not have oddball looking character actors anymore with all the afordable options to look "pretty"
I read the book a while ago and during the bungee jacket scene, it actually felt like she was about to die. Unfortunately that feeling is hard to replicate in a movie.
they didn't make the "Pretties" grotesque enough, the main bit of the book i remember was Tally finds this old magazine and is looking at a picture of a supermodel and is disgusted, like how she feels looking at all the other Uglies, and she says the model is almost "Pretty" but not quite - the Pretties have huge eyes and tiny noses etc, and as a 12 year old this made a huge impact about how beauty standards are completely manufactured and totally dependent on your upbringing etc
I 100% agree!! That portion of the book has always stuck with me too for the same reason. I always hoped if they made a movie adaptation, they would use that as direction and confirmation that the Pretties don't look anything like what we currently deem attractive in our world, because that's the whole point!
I never read the books or heard of it before but this is immediately what i thought when I heard the concept, and when I saw the clips of the movie I was like huh did I miss something 😅
I was watching LavenderTown's video on this movie and she made that point too, and compared the look they should have gone for to Alita Battle Angel which I thought was a good reference point. Very uncanny valley
There's a twilight zone episode that does this concept super well called Eye of the Beholder. Definitely recommend giving it a watch if u have the time
Carley, you HAVE to read the books! It’s right up your alley
My favorite part was when Carly stopped caring and kept calling Cable ‘Cradle’
And then remembered that she should care. And then forgot again. We love a brain rotted queen.
And then forgets her own made up name until she was like “wait no her name isn’t curdle, it’s cradle”
imagine being one of the people in a dystopian universe that has a normal name and an average life. you're the kid named steve, trying to get through the 4th exposition assembly of the week, and it keeps getting interrupted by a girl named Chartreuse driving her motorcycle back from the Saving Human Rights Club
There's a book kind of like that called 'the rest of us just live here' by patrick ness. It's about this kind of perks of being a wallflowery friend group just trying to enjoy their last year of highschool and going through real world problems (mental health issues, break-ups, parents divorce, career choices,...) and every chapter has one paragraph about what the 'indie kids' i.e. the usual main characters named things like finn or sage are doing to save the world (like the school explodes and there's wars between gods and stuff).
It's my real life
"Chartreuse" 😆
@@antoniafrank6192was coming to comment the same book 😂
LMAO
Really bold of them to end the movie in a cliffhanger fully believing they will get to do a second one
I knowww, it annoyed me loads lol
I mean, "After" got like five. Hollywood is whack af
netflix has been known for cancelling good content and keep up some random things for multiple seasons/movies, so we will see hahah
@@anabelmanrique7845I’m still crying over few series they cancelled and then they produce this crap with full intent for it to have a sequel 🤡
Well everyone is watching it and making videos about it so it probably will. It might even be a trilogy if we’re lucky 😍🔫
it is so crazy to hear you say "i was kinda hoping they did a blood pact" because they LITERALLY DID IN THE BOOK. i barely remember this book and i do not believe i finished it, but i distinctly remember the main character describing how she and her friend made a blood pact to be friends forever, and/or to make themselves "blood siblings" or whatever. that is EXACTLY what they did, and i feel like changing it makes the matching scars way more hollow?? like i'm not gonna get all sentimental about the time you broke my ipad, dude
ok wait i've gotten to the end of the video now and i definitely did finish this book, i just ejected almost all of it from my brain.
This is the singular thing I remember from the book too lol
YES!!!! and then the surgery took perris's scar away and it was a Thing
@@aidenssadagain u get it !!
they did in the movie too
i was in a test audience for this movie a few years ago and im so sorry they didnt take our feedback into consideration, lol
Did they make any good changes?
Did they make any changes?
any changes made?
You're lying
Nose was so funny because they made Chase wear a prosthetic nose but they didn’t put one on the actor that played him as a kid so he had like a perfectly straight, normal sized nose
Also, to cast Joey King a woman with big doe eyes as a character nicknamed “squint” is truly a joke
@@bashfulnathRIGHT!! Like only ONE person in Hollywood (Anya Taylor Joy, who slays) could have been WORSE for that description 😭😭 “Omg I can't wait to stop being all squinty”… No one in this movie has wider eyes than you ma'am calm down 🙂↕️
I'm okay with the whole “normal human face = ugly” narrative, sure. But WHAT?!?!
to be fair, people's noses grow when they age ykkk
OKAY FINALLY SOMEONE TALKED ABOUT THE BIRTHDAY ASSEMBLIES. It actually bothered me so so much, in no world does it make sense. They give so much exposition but it still doesn't make ANY sense
THANK YOU 😭 I watched this movie with my brother and when the assembly came on I just kinda turned to him and said '...do they do this EVERY day?'
What did they fucking do to Scott Westerfeld's normal ass teen dystopia 😭😭😭😭 they fucking Diverged it for no reason!!!!
@@Lolo50000 THAT WAS LITERALLY ME
I just assumed they lumped people together. Like a lot of dystopians do the "everyone gets older at the same time" thing
@@AnotherTurning yeah and how every horse in each hemisphere has the same birthday. I also would have accepted that they're grown in tubes or have scheduled surrogacy births or whatever bc Future
I think the book came out when the plot was actually interesting. Early 20s we didnt have much self image love for teenage girls. The first book came out before Hunger Games and it felt very different at the time.
But in 2024, we've had the body positivity movement. We've had the dystopian teenager will save the world and there's a love triangle trend. It feels like this movie came out 15 years too late
Yes, it came out in 2005! I think it was so wildly ahead of its time. I think there’s a way they could have made it work but not as a shitty Netflix movie
@@cassiea13245678I really loved this series when it came out! Shame the movies could have been done differently back then. Maybe.
i agree!! i LOVED this the first time i read it and i genuinely think the book is really good, especially for its time
@@cassiea13245678hear me out! It couldve been perfect, not as a full dystopian but if it was more horror movie esque.
This whole series was such a bonding experience for my mom and I. The idea of these unnaturally beautiful people, and being so ingrained in your own image of beauty that you flinch at normal aging. It’s still relevant, but if it had come out alongside something like Botched, it would have been much more timely
Uglies is joining Beastly in the cursed genre of horrific adaptations of books I checked out from my middle school library
Jenny Nicolsons video on beastly gives me *life* 😂
up there with the fallen movie 😭
There's a Korean movie with a similar concept but it's executed a lot better because everyone literally looks the same. Not human same though. They all look like paper or plastic dolls. So the audience can't even be like, "well the protagonist is prettier than the definition of pretty" or whatever. Like they're not yassified, they're literally....dolls. Lemme find the name of the movie
*Edit:* Human Form is the name of the movie I'm talking about
Loved
That's the first thing I thought about when I started hearing about the plot
its a really great short film made in a culture with rampant "lookism"! and it was made 10 years ago and still is more socially relevant than Uglies
Watch Logan’s run from the late 70’s .
@@kaemincha I think the book Uglies is socially relevant now, the movie just executed it horribly
when i saw this thumbnail i actually out loud said “oh thank god”
like I’ve been waiting for you specifically to cover this I’m serious
literally me too
Me toooo
no exactly
literally same, I couldn’t even finish the movie and was like I NEED Carley to cover this
As soon as I watched the movie I was like “I hope that Carley does a video”😂
Something else about this movie - one of the producers (Joey King's manager), Dan Spilo, was ejected from Survivor season 39 for groping contestants and crew members. This was 5 years ago.
Whoa I love survivor and didn't know this. I'm a new fan though. 😢
Ew wtf why is the world like this
the way i only watched this movie for the youtube commentary and none of it has hit like i wanted I AM SO SEATED FOR THIS
Ive gone back to this comment like five times during this video, i dont know what short of string you pulled in my brain but i cant stop thinking about it
Oh. MYGOD. This.
Watching content specifically to have context for the YT commentary scene is EXACTLY where I'm at rn.
If Joey King's big round eyes are squinty then what are mine 😂
Real I got those Asian eyes, do I now have no eyes? 😭
Exactly. I get the character was called squint in the book, but like, give her a new nickname for the movie. Especially since as a pretty her eyes became smaller.
unrelated, but your youtube handle would double as a great drag name!
@@migratory.114 LOL I'll keep that in mind 😂😂
@@audrey9609it did feel a little insane to call a white girl that but I’m also white so idk 😭😭I grew up around a lot of horrible people so it immediately felt offensive to me but maybe other people don’t think of it that way 😭 I hope that’s not weird to say, sorry, the movie has bigger problems obviously lol
0:38 If The Uglies actually caused the demise of Woody Allen, I would never shut up or stop singing its praises. I would single-handedly manage a winning Oscar campaign for it.
Same ! ! !
In the book's mild defence, it takes Tally a few weeks to reach the Smoke, so it's a little more believable Shay and David are a things. There's a whole thing about how she just grabbed a bunch of the MREs Cable gives her, but doesn't understand the lable and only taking spaghetti Bolognese for her whole trip and she hates it by the end.
SPAG-BOL!!!!
James Acaster?! 😳@@glennaschoeler
THANK YOU! I was cracking up at that bit, because Westerfield does such a good job of making you FEEL just how long it takes Tally to navigate to the Smoke. Its the most memorable part of the first book for me.
“and the cops chase her for being ugly” such a relatable thing to say omg 25:44
i read the uglies series like 15 years ago or something and i barely remember the details, but i DO remember one of the leading guys in a sequel was described to get the pretty surgery to look like a bishie anime boy. the book describes him with "anime-like" features. i was a full on weeaboo at the time and thought that was awesome to include, but now it kind of sounds terrifying considering the melty features of 2005 era bishie anime boys. also one of the girls (maybe shay?) had eye replacements that had ticking clocks in them and they had fake cigarettes dispensed from their materializer wall for the party they were going to, i remember it specifying fake ones which was very funny conceptually. the cosmetic descriptions in the books were very fun all things considered.
I have never forgotten about the Extras guy who enables “full honesty brain mode” and can’t lie or deceive other people in any way 😭 what a wild thing to voluntarily do to yourself
That description is etched into my brain; it was the moment I was like "whoa...yeah, those giant-ass eyes would be in the DEPTHS of the uncanny valley in real life..."
@@cam4636I swear to god in specials they also describe people who turn themselves into aliens, and MAKE THEIR EYES EVEN BIGGER? Like is it just half of their skull at that point?
@@addyshorhnr3544I think that was in Extras, they literally gave themselves prehensile toes and wore zero gravity boots to prepare themselves to launch into orbit 😂
as an autistic girlie, I appreciate how little eye contact you make. totally serious, all these youtubers who stare at the camera dead on for minutes on end make me stressed lmao
same actually! i hadn't put that together til i read your comment
A few years ago Scott Westerfeld released a follow-up series to the original Uglies trilogy (+ Extras) called Imposters. It’s set in the future of the same universe and explores what happens when the world wakes up from being pretty, I loved it! For the love of god please review the books bc yes this movie was ass x
Ohhhh interesting! I liked Extras the best tbh, I still sometimes work on a script version of it bc the themes 🤌✨️
@@hockeygrrlmuse Imposters shows us what the world ended up doing with 10 whole years post mind-rain. You see what methods the cities end up using to govern themselves, the technologies that people developed, and the horrific consequences that some of this freedom came with. In the words of Dr Cable, freedom has a way of destroying things. 110% think you’d enjoy the read if you liked Extras!
Ooh, I’ll have to check it out. I had a lot of fear when it came out that it was like a 10 years too late money grab
I know you talked about it but I still feel like people need to know that the man who plays Peris is 32. 32!!!
David (Keith Powers) is also 32 😭 why are both of the love interests twice the ages of their characters
Ngl the makeup artists did a really good job at making Keith Powers look 18
@@e_intelligence2487idk if that was the makeup artists doing
@@e_intelligence2487he didn’t look 18 at all lmao
@@Xoxo0xx0honestly he has a baby face so he def could pass for 18-21
That first minute life update was unexpectedly relatable, she said on her fourth 50min "before bed" video , even though they specifically came home to sleep cause they've barely slept all week
go to bed
I've seen people defend them choosing conventionally attractive people to play the Uglies because, like you said, the idea behind it is that the beauty standards are so high that everyone is ugly. But to me it just kind of feels like the movie is trying to say: "isn't it dystopian that in this world even the PRETTY people are UGLY? How terrible!" and that just doesn't seem compelling to me. I know there's a lot more going on with the worldbuilding, but that seems to be something that a lot of people are focusing on.
I think if the pretties looked AGGRESSIVELY altered and borderline inhuman to show how extreme the standards have become instead of just looking like instagram models with contact lenses and wigs on
Like if the conventionally attractive people are labeled Ugly and the Pretty people all look psychotic thatd probably be more effective, but this movie was a disaster so it certainly wouldn’t have saved it lmao.
It's just like... The whole Bacteria in the oil thing doesn't make sense to me... We use oil because it burns well and we can use that to heat to transfer into energy. But if there's bacteria in it.... you can just burn the bacteria too...?????????
If the bacteria broke down the chemical bonds in the oil the oil wouldn't release the same amount of energy when burned. Or at least that's my understanding I did fail chemistry so I may be wildly wrong lol. There are some bacteria and insects that have adapted to consume plastics.
in the book it was different!!! in the book the flowers were hella rare and were worth money so people started selectively breeding them to grow better but then the flowers turned out to be hella invasive and destroyed the environment. thats why there was a fire, bc the smoke people were burning them to stop their growth
I wish it were directed by Ryan Murphy. Not like it would be good or anything, but it would be a more entertaining mess, like glee.
definitely needed a mean girl that was the assistant to cable who was pretty that was a b*tch and used their insecurities to insult them the typical Ryan Murphy way
Like a car crash you can't pull your eyes from
absolutely
This really feels like it could have been in the Riverdale camp of "It's not good, but it's entertaining in a trainwreck sort of way"
YO!! This is so iconic to me right now because the only thing that I remember from reading the uglies when I was like 12 is the first line of the first book?? That part has been seared into my goddamn brain lol “the sky was the color of cat vomit“ like I’m sorry, that’s criminal 💀
i'm so glad i'm not the only one who has that line burned into my brain
Omg the way this line has been seared in my brain but I could NOT remember what book!!! Ahh!
I will stay on my soapbox! Uglies came out in 2005!! It's not a dystopian copy, it IS the dysoptian blueprint!! (and this movie is different from the book in a lot of strange ways)
The YA dystopian blueprint is The Giver.
@@jayjayjenniabsolutely but for the 2000s resurgence uglies was deffo the blueprint
I hate to break it to you, but dystopian novels have been around since the 60s. Uglies is not even close to being the first.
@@ThatWeirdo04 They're talking about in the YA genre, in the same way that romance novels have been around for centuries but Twilight reshaped the YA romance.
I 100% agree! All of the tropes it falls into may seem bad from the present point of view but it was like the blueprint for modern YA dystopians. I loved these books so much
love the mixup of riverdale’s mortician and Laverne Cox’s character cause the plot of this movie would be like 10 min of an episode of riverdale
I wish they had dug into it, Hunger Games style. The surgeries in the book were unnerving. Waking up with different bones and skin, no longer being able to bruise, having all of your teeth removed. I also remember being really fascinated by the "middle" and "late" pretties. Aging is something that you go to a hospital to get done, to achieve a more age-appropriate look (i.e. while still looking young). So instead of getting to experience a lifetime of changes in your pretty body, you age maybe twice, artificially.
The consent thing was so weird in this film. Not giving her the cure after she's said several time before that she doesn't want the surgery is such a weird way to think. It's like having sex with a drugged person after they asked you to have sex with them in their drugged state even though you know very well that they wouldn't want that normally. Like, the only ethical action is to help them get to them back to normal
Exactly, Carly nailed how it feels really worrying to imply that certain kinds of incapacitation or damage strips someone of their autonomy/choice but like. Fiction is the perfect place to explore that concept!! We could've had an interesting little thought experiment about free will & informed consent without real-world stakes bc the Pretty surge/lesion thing isn't real. But no we can't have nuance in our YA movie
I don't think they make it obvious in the movie, but in the book it was really focused on the idea that this was an entirely untested cure made by one grieving woman in a makeshift lab in the ruins of an old city. And the way it worked was literally eating away the part of your brain with the lesions, so there was a chance it would eat more than the lesions and cause severe brain damage as a side effect.
It wasn't the fact that this brain-altered shay didn't want the cure even though everyone knew normal shay would have, it was the fact that it is unethical to make this girl a medical test subject when she didn't have all the information beforehand and was now saying no.
Also the book was written in 2005 which was a very different world as far as consent discourse
the outfit is giving Midsommar and im livin for it
14:45 exactlyyyyyy! it had me really spiralling. i never read the books, so i was like "well maybe it's a krypton matrix situation and they don't have babies normally anymore? and they birth them in groups, so the assembly is only like once a month??" but nooo, i'm just overthinker xD
Oh great, Carley's here to rip on something I was wondering about but didn't care enough to commit to actually researching, great, perfect, there's my next hour planned
I remember REALLY liking the book series when i was growing up. But now I'm just like, "what the hell?" the entire time
The books are still good! The movie just botched the hell out of it
Bro I watched this the other day (completely fried) and came out angry and sober. I’ve never been so annoyed watching a film lmaoo
LMFAOOO
Review begins at 4:54.
I was obsessedddd with these books at a teen, and I knew when they announced they were making a movie that it would be terrible 😭but bless u for covering it! Also completely normalized surgery for me. Like I was 8 and genuinely though I’d just *get* surgery at 18
so sorry you're having trouble sleeping ! hope you have some rest soon :) ty for the video
if i was in the pretties universe i’d choose to get purple eyes so i could be the first person with alexandria’s genesis
As a young impressionable middle schooler, I did fall for that one and embarrassed myself when I brought it up to my parents.
Why does this movie kind of reminds me of the Kendall and Kylie dystopian book 💀
When that one girl turned around all yassified I lmao'ed so hard, I'm sorry
Me: *gets lobotomised*
“Hey we can we cure u off your lobotomy”
Me: ‘No you can’t I like being lobotomised’
“Oh okay guess they don’t consent, nevermind then”
30:47 Hey Carley, sick trick 🤘
As a trans person, the fact that they chose a trans actor to play the supervillain who tricks children into getting surgery feels suuuuuuper icky. Like did nobody think of the optics here?!
@@lottiestewart8918 oh shit you're so right. I assumed Laverne wanted to put up a similar performance to Viola Davis in the Hunger Game prequel but that particular misinformation campaign is going HARD rn 😬
look i know queer villains have a history of being an L but have you considered queer villains may actually be a sick W
That was my immediate thought. Really strange messaging
@@famewolf.mp4but whys it gotta be a message 😭 let transes be toxic and powerful lol. i bet transphobes think its propaganda that shes in the movie at all
@@princicatthat's a fair point! Transphobes will find a way to be transphobic anyway. and I should remember an actors jobs is to act, so why would I or anyone else equate the trans actor with the behaviour of a character they play. (Idk if this is coming off sarcastic I'm being genuine !)
my friend in 5th grade read these books, i never read them but as far as i remember from listening to her talk about them there’s no love triangle in the books. honestly it seems like maybe the books are more about girls being friends which is pretty nice
I dont remember if theres a love triangle, but I'm pretty sure there was a love story of some kind (possibly spread over the trilogy?)
Glenn would totally fit in the Hunger Games because the word refers to something natural, and then she'd give him some whimsical last name like Clemmingtrap
Also, I remember reading about some of the names being pretty close to modern names (Peeta and Peter being the most obvious) meaning the language may have evolved over time
I reread the whole book yesterday while camping and am actually blown away with how much they changed the plot lol
0:23 when youve listened to too much girl historians you were expecting 'and im blair'
havent read the books since i was in middle school but i feel like in them the matching scar thing was from them actually do a blood pact carving their initials into each others palms thing so the ipad glass switch up is so bland like😭😭 why would you take interesting character development and make it so flat?
the same premise of Uglies was actually explored in a much more interesting way in the 1964 Twilight Zone episode "Number 12 Looks Just Like You." From IMDB: "In a future society, everyone must undergo an operation at age 19 to become beautiful and conform to society. Since her father [censor] after his surgery, 18-year-old Marilyn desperately wants to hold on to her identity." It's a short story that has something worth saying, which is a lot more than whatever we got with Uglies lol
Immediately thought of this one too! Genuinely disturbed me
16:01 "We're getting like 50 years of history. For a book? Love that."
Literally none of the events you've covered so far were in the book 😭😭😭😭
I think it would've been perfect for 12 year olds like 15 years ago. 10/10
it was !! i read this book at twelve and i remember thinking it was deep. then again, i didn't proceed to book two, so uh. maybe not *too* perfect. still, parts of it stuck with me, so it did something right
And it was lol
@@plushdragonteddy I read 'em all back then and I remember also being absolutely moved by them
have i already watched 4 videos about this movie? yes. am i so unbelievably seated for this one? yes.
Glen is actually an ideal Hunger Games name. Glen, noun, a secluded narrow valley. The deer was in the Glen.
😂😂
Yeah it’s definitely a lumber district (7?) name
I am having my period rn and not in a good mental state. my grandma is sick, there are several wars going on and climat change is just fuzzing all around in my mind and i am balling my eyes out about it but this video calms me down a bit. Thank you
the plot of this reminds me of that one episode of the twilight zone where everyone has to get a surgery when they turn 18, and they have like 20 different options to choose from
any time they cast 25 year olds as high schoolers in movies i think of kennie jd's "brooding hot 25 year old teenager" bit.
Randomly burst it to my babyfaced coworkers lol
That’s the cast of grease in a nutshell for you in which half of them were in their thirties .
@@centrevezgaming4862 got my mom to watch grease 4 years ago & we spent the whole time laughing at the actor's ages.
33:34 note that “insta baddie” is actually Bre from selling sunset…along with Lucky Blue Smith making a feature as well as Pretties lol
the second i saw this movie was released i have been waiting to hear your thoughts on it, today feels like christmas i am truly blessed
17:00 is so real. like please let’s make real movies again! it’s concerning the amount of movies these days that keep explaining the lore in such an obvious and straightforward way.
This movie literally felt like a 2010 period piece, like every creative choice just feels so 2010 Y/A renaissance and I love it for that
7:47 Alexa play 🎶 brooding hot 25 year old teenager 🎶 by Kennie JD.
16:40 I am sorry but that straightfaced hunger games lore took me out😂
This chaotic energy is hillarious but I do hope you get some sleep soon, lubricate that brain girl
i have insomnia and ur videos put me to sleep every night. there’s just something about your voice that knocks me out immediately. i love you so much for this. also your videos are NOT boring i also watch them when i’m not trying to sleep don’t worry ❤️❤️
Honestly my literary skills were probably the best when I was a teenager because my brain was on 10000 trying to figure out who A was
I came to such a realization while I was listening to your video. I a mid 20 something year old, teach like 12 year olds dance. and they repeatedly think that I am 17/18 and realized that they think that besides my baby face, they also probably have really only been exposed to 17/18 year olds through media where twenty/thirty something year olds play teenagers
I think my main problem with this movie, is that I actually would like to just be yassified and completely oblivious to the worlds problems. This sounds like a fantasy more than a dystopian 😭
nah cuz I read this book in middle school and this was my main takeaway too😭
right?? they made the lesions sound sooo bad but honestly if I could be stupid hot and unaware of the world I would 🤷🏻♀️
GIRL give me the brain lesions I don't want to think anything ✨️
so cool for everyone in this thread to reveal that they don’t care if other people are suffering if they don’t have to think about :)!
Essentially considering becoming pretty isn’t exclusive or a privilege, literally everyone gets to be pretty if they just make it to sixteen. Sure they aren’t nice to uglies but that will eventually stop. If the price of being pretty was really bad or only certain people could become pretty it would be much more compelling. They should have portrayed the world as a utopia and then a twist proves it to be a dystopia but nope💀
Does Netflix own Joey King’s soul? She’s not a bad actress, how does she keep ending up in crappy Netflix things?
31:49 super into "I invented that" as a rebrand of "I lied/made that up"
My insomnia tip is that if you just lay down with your eyes closed and rest, that's better than nothing! I listen to a lot of audio books.
the way that i misrepresented this to someone as a divergent parody SO confidently going solely off the cover because i was so sure
this is my time to speak of the birthday paradox: there's a 50% chance that in a group of 23 people, 2 of them share the same birthday. so 9 people out of 500 sharing a birthday is pretty sound
i’ve been waiting for you to cover this. I feel like you just get it ✨ Sending good, sleepy vibes 💜
Oh, good to hear they didn’t use the “self harm will let you break free from the ~mind control~” plot from the books
The what now?
That’s the second book so they could feel “bubbly”
Yeah I read these books in third grade and it was... A less than helpful plotline
I’m begging you to read the book
I need her to review the series
need u to understand i've been waiting for you to post like it's my sole form of sustenance in this world
Uglies is like a bad parody of divergent ( which is saying a lot cuz divergent sucks )
And I think it came first but I'm not disagreeing!
Pretty sure Uglies pre-dates Divergent 😂
Exactly like how do you take a perfectly normal YA book series that came out BEFORE Divergent and then fucking Diverge it????????
@@kendra_katIt actually predates the YA Dystopia genre as a whole, with the first book being released in 2005, to 2008's Hunger Games.
@@yeah5895the hunger games didn’t start the ya dystopia genre. it’s existed for a while but I think more ppl would say The Giver really popularized it, and that was published in the 90s I think
The books used to be everything to me so watching this movie as an adult was humbling
If I were to ever make a movie, Carly, you legit would be my first test audience you have such good, valid, iconic takes
I feel like the whole premise does not make sense: beauty standards tend to reflect certain desirable traits (usually a combination of wealth, effort, youth, and health). If every adult looks like that, there is no reason for people to keep seeing them as beautiful.
first of all so sorry we’ve driven you to this place. unfortunately now i’m going to need you to unpack the horrors that ensue in every season of the vampire diaries.
Please read the series - I need to hear an unhinged review of it.
CGI now stands for Carley Generated Imagery for the hoverboard scene ALONE!
I really enjoyed watching you take this apart. I've been on the fence about watching it. I read this series as a teenager and I remember it being so amazing and wonderful and it lit a little revolutionary fire under my butt early on. I wish you could review the entire book series. But this was fun!
15:20 you know what, statistically speaking it is actually a pretty known "paradox" in statistical mechanics, that in a group of N people people there's a high chance that at least two people share a birthday
idk i just wanted to point that out it's a very fun concept :-)
I thought this was a remake of the Kendall and Kylie book
im fucking dead💀
49:09 i cant believe uncarly said this
The only good thing about this movie is that chase stokes looks exactly like my brother, and imagining my brother as yassified as a kardashian is the greatest thing to ever happen in my life
I was only ever going consume Uglies through the context of youtube breakdown yass(ified) ✨️
The way she keeps calling her dr cradle 😂
That whole "Glen" bit made me snort water out of my nose lol "Hey Cashmere, hey Gloss, have you met GLEN? He's also here." lmao
its like she knew i was about to paint my nails
0:54 girl same, it makes living with my family a hellhole because I'm a ✨️drama queen✨️❤ I'm with you, hope you'll be able to have good sleep soon 🦋
I watched 5 minutes last night then ditched it then woke up to this you are truly doing the lord's werk
Btw, nowadays actors don't need to get surgery for cosmetic improvements. They can get their nose sculpted with hyaluronic acid. They can reduce or fill out the fat in their face using sculptra, and have many options for good looking skin.
And of course, if you want to loose weight, there are pills for that.
I fear we might not have oddball looking character actors anymore with all the afordable options to look "pretty"
Me, watching from Kyiv: Home girl wearing a vyshyvanka
I read the book a while ago and during the bungee jacket scene, it actually felt like she was about to die. Unfortunately that feeling is hard to replicate in a movie.
Your commentary is everything. I'd love to hear your thoughts on Joker: Folie a Deux