evangelinegabrielle

I'm not a fan of the book series, I read Uglies and Pretties and they truly bored me.

Even in the movie, the characters lack the qualities to make them interesting. We don't truly know why the protagonist changes her mind (also that quick shift in the romantic interest? Yikes), or her way of thought, I don't really care about the outcome of her adventure. I found Shay very annoying and the villain was one of the most stereotypical antagonist in YA dystopia. Also, a lot of these actors weren't that good, sometimes I could feel they were doing this for a high school project, not for a Netflix production. Even the adults lacked some theatrical abilities. Not all of them were bad, I give props to Joey King because she greatly delivered some lines, especially her frustration at the beginning of the movie where she says "I don't want to be free, I want to be Pretty." That is engraved in my mind. Yet I liked how most of the teenagers LOOKED like teenagers, even if the main and secondary actors are like 25-30 smth years old...

I also loved how the production created the world, those futuristic landscapes were very interesting and mesmerizing. You could really see the difference between the grey setting where the Uglies lived and the colorful one where the Pretties spent their time.

I understand the production team wanted to make the transformation somewhat realistic, but only putting some makeup on people wasn't really what I envisioned as "the surgery".

And why would the government care about some kids who run away anyway? I won't write a spoiler here, but even the danger the villain feared wasn't that scary and could have been easily combated. And to call literally children UGLIES, wasn't that the kind of discrimination and bullying their leaders wanted to erase? I just think the way this is preached in the story is kinda disappointing.

I have mixed opinions, overall it's not a bad movie, but they could have done so much more and corrected some mistakes or plot holes that existed in the book.

Yet, I like the idea the story comes from, it represents the actual state of the world and how people put so much emphasis on some superficial beauty, how pretty privilege exists and how you can get advantage from it and also suffer from it because you lose yourself in a fake world.

Although the series is very different from the books, I really liked it, but at the same time, for five or six episodes, I didn't understand what was happening. I think the series is made for people who have read the books and yet this is in a way a mistake because at the same time, readers usually want a faithful adaptation but this adaptation borrows very little from the books. However, I recommend reading the first two books if you haven't because the series borrows from Lauren Kate's series only the names of the characters, the location, and a very abstract idea of the book.

What annoys me, however, is that the series does not have a specific ending, everything happens very suddenly and the ending, and although I understood it because I read the second book, it seems to me that it represents a climax rather than a denouement. Although the characters don't look like I imagined them, except for Lucinda, I think the actors played very well, especially Jessica. Initially, I didn't trust the actress who played Penn, but watching over the eight episodes I think she was able to portray her very well. The atmosphere itself is very mysterious and although sometimes it seemed to me that nothing was happening at the same time there was a lot of suspense and I wanted to see what was happening as quickly as possible so I watched eight episodes in a row. All this screenplay feels more like a kind of beginning or like a kind of introduction to what should have followed, that's why I can't give it more than a 7, but if I separated the actual book from the movie, I would probably give it less. However, I understood the series precisely because I read the book, in a way it is a screen adaptation inspired by the book, but at the same time, it is not. I wish there was a new season because the CGI at least was a lot cooler than what we saw in the 2016 movie. I also loved the cinematography.

Everything is very boring. The plot is practically non-existent, we only see how some rich people interact with each other and how the poor are mocked. There is nothing else. Also, these "high school teenagers" behave as if they are full-grown adults, actually I can't see them as 17-18-year-olds, but 25-30-year-olds because they behave very mature as if they have a thousands of responsibilities and secrets and it's not realistic at all. I don't know, maybe if it was a college drama, their behavior would still work, but not here. Some of the actors act well, but others have the same facial expression for three whole episodes, like they're confused vegetables. I had high expectations, but it's not worth your time.