Film Review: Uglies

Meaningful messaging wrapped in predictable plotting

Decades ago, the television series The Twilight Zone presented an episode called “Eye of the Beholder” in which a disfigured woman gets a chance to have plastic surgery to become beautiful. Throughout the episode, we never fully see the faces of the characters until the very end. And, in traditional Twilight Zone form, there’s a twist in the reveal. Last year, the film Barbie gave us a thoughtful, poignant exploration of the pressure of unrealistic beauty standards that left women around the world cheering. The new Nexflix film Uglies is the latest story to tackle the concept of beauty. However, unlike its predecessors, the positive messaging in Uglies gets a bit tangled in the execution.

Uglies is based on Scott Westerfeld’s 2006 middle grade novel set in a future dystopian society where children are required to undergo cosmetic surgery to become beautiful (“Pretties”) when they turn sixteen. Until then, teens who have not yet had the surgery are called “Uglies.” Once the surgery occurs, the beautiful ones get to live in a perpetual frat party in the futuristically cool Pretty City (yes, that’s the name). How exactly does this help society? According to the backstory, the old world destroyed itself with overuse of fossil fuel, environmental pollution, and wars. Beautiful people had unfair advantages over ugly people and people had conflicts based on physical appearances. To solve this problem, everyone is made beautiful. This setup comes from the source material, but it’s confusing for appearance-based conflicts to be solved by making everyone look like the primary discriminators. Also, the racial and ethnic differences continue after the surgery, so it requires a willing suspension of disbelief to theoretically create peace by turning everyone into Balenciaga models. Of course, we eventually find out there is more to the surgery than just creating facial symmetry, and eventually the story slides into The Stepford Wives territory.

The film follows protagonist Tally Youngblood (Joey King) as she anxiously awaits her turn to become pretty while she attends the boarding school for Uglies. In flashbacks, we see her long-term, close friendship with her bestie Peris (Chase Stokes), who is a few months older than her. The two promise to remain best friends for life, and Peris promises to visit her after his surgery. However, when the story opens, Peris has been transformed and now has cut off communications with Tally. Tally engages in low-stakes shenanigans, like sneaking into New Pretty City to see him, but on a return trip she encounters a new friend: Shay (Brianne Tju), who tells her about an alternative, surgery-free community outside the city (called The Smokes), run by a mysterious leader called David. When Shay disappears, Tally gets caught up in the government’s search, led by the cruel and severe Dr. Calder (Laverne Cox), for David and the Smokes community.

Although the story has several departures from the novel, the film is entertaining in a low-stakes way. The special effects of the hover skateboarding are fun, and the visuals of the dystopian community and the gorgeous scenery of Tally’s journey to the Smokes is appealing. The acting from all the leads is solid and engaging throughout the film. The problem is the plot. There are so many incongruities that eventually they become distracting. For example, except for Peris, the appearance differences between the existing Uglies and the existing Pretties ranges from minimal to non-existent. Tally’s new bestie Shay is supermodel gorgeous despite being an “Ugly.” When Tally gets to the Smoke, outsiders David (Keith Powers) and his best friend Croy (Jan Luis Castellanos) look like they fell out of GQ. A few characters undergo the long-discussed surgery during the film. Again, with the exception of Peris, the big glow-up amounts to an anti-climactic addition of department store makeup and a quick trip to the salon for clip-ins. Anyone who understands the concept of mascara and lipliner will be rolling their eyes at the “change.” If this were a stage play, it would be understandable. But the unwillingness to take visual risks in a big-budget Netflix film is a little disappointing. The only character who stands out as particularly changed or uniquely “pretty” is Peris. Between the makeup and the special effects, he manages to look artificially chiseled, with razor-sharp cheekbones, piercing eyes, and a perpetual William Shatner in Star Trek glow about him. His visual is the best example of what creepy, out of control beauty would look like. The similarity in attractiveness between Pretties and Uglies may be an intentional choice in the film, perhaps designed to be an ironic social commentary on the relativism of beauty. If so, the premise of the story, that universal beauty eliminates societal problems, becomes irrelevant.

In addition to the lackluster visuals, the plot itself is problematic. David, who is a likeable classic hero/prophet/leader archetypal character, falls too suddenly in love with Tally, almost at first sight, and certainly too shortly after meeting her. The acting is fine, but the behavior is inconsistent with both David’s reputation as a sharp, elusive, pragmatist and with their short and relatively meaningless relationship. Tally’s character is also inconsistent. She is initially presented as inquisitive, rebellious, and fierce, but she is simultaneously whiny, cowardly, and indecisive. Teen emotions are complicated, but by the end of the film it was hard to take her character seriously. Joey King’s acting is solid and appealing, but some of the cliché lines she is forced to recite were eyeroll-worthy.

If you are expecting a Barbie-esque discourse into the superficiality of societal standards, or commentary on racism and sexism, this is not that film. Uglies is a traditional middle grade/YA dystopian adventure where the grown-ups are bad, besties betray you, the rebel-boy is boyfriend material, and in the end, you finally find your true self. Depending on what you are in the mood for, this may be the perfect low-stress film for you.

Nerd Coefficient: 6/10.

Highlights

• Appealing actors
• Incongruous plot and visuals
• Perfectly fine background entertainment

POSTED BY: Ann Michelle Harris – Multitasking, fiction-writing Trekkie currently dreaming of her next beach vacation.

Feminist Futures: The Female Man

Dossier: Russ, Joanna. The Female Man [Bantam, 1975]

Filetype: Book

Executive Summary: Two women -- Joanna, a writer living in 1970s New York, and Jeannine, who lives in a parallel reality where the Great Depression never ended -- find their lives uprooted when Janet Evason, a time traveler from a future, all-female society called Whileaway, gathers them into her orbit.

Joanna is a staunch feminist and shows Janet around her world as the two women attempt to explain each's reality to the other. Jeannine is obsessed with the idea of marriage, and her mother's constant pressure doesn't help things. Jeannine is not enthusiastic about marriage, or her current best prospect, a guy named Cal, but the prospect of either getting married or remaining unmarried consumes most of her thoughts. After Janet collects Jeannine, the three women retreat to the home of a "typical family." This home is provided by the Wildings, and their daughter, Laura Rose, who begins exploring a sexual relationship with Janet.

Janet explains Whileaway's technologically advanced, but largely agrarian society, where all sexual relationships are homosexual, since a plague killed off all men many generations earlier. Children are conceived through a scientific process, and children only stay with their biological mothers for a few years before going away to school and then the series of work placements that will occupy the rest of their lives. Joanna and Jeannine are able to briefly visit Whileaway, and meet Janet's wife. 

In visiting Jeannine's milieu, Jeannine visits her family and goes on dates with several men, trying to imagine what a marriage to one of them might look like, and if it would be better than settling for Cal.

Ultimately, all three women find themselves transported to yet another reality, this time by Jael, an assassin from a dystopian future where the men and women are locked into a literal battle of the sexes. Jael takes the three women through her reality, assassinates a male leader, and reveals the technology that has allowed her to pull together these four versions of the same woman, but from different, parallel timelines.

Feminist Future: Jael suggests to Janet that there was no plague that wiped out the men of her timeline, but rather a literal battle like the one Jael is currently living through, and then the female survivors eradicated that narrative from their histories as Whileaway evolved from the resulting peace. Although Janet doesn't believe her, this suggests that the book is positing three possible futures: one in which the men and women continue on with women struggling to achieve equality and making small progress here and there, which extends from Joanna and Jeannine's presents; another in which, as women are ascendant in power, the men literally fight back against any further progress and the sexes are segregated; and finally, a future in which only one sex survives. The final scenario is the only peaceful one, although Whileaway is shown to have its own share of violence, however rare.

Hope for the Future: At the end of the book and after their stay with Jael, Joanna and Jeannine return to their timelines with a new sense of power and purpose. There is a stronger sense that they will not only advocate more strongly for themselves, but for other women, as well. There's no clear roadmap toward peaceful co-existence between men and women, but the sense that progress is possible is definitely there.

Legacy: This book is probably Russ' most influential work of fiction, where her book How to Suppress Women's Writing is likely her most heralded work of non-fiction. It takes the ideas of feminism and foregrounds them in a fairly didactic way, and confronts head-on many assumptions about ability and the place of women in society. It's interesting to think of this book in conversation with Herland (which Russ may or may not have had access to), because both are largely works of explication, where there isn't a whole lot of plot movement. In the same way that Charlotte Perkins Gilman wrote three men that were meant to capture three aspects of masculinity, Russ' four women are clearly archetypes of different aspects of the female experience, if not "femininity." 

It is a near-certainty that, for many female readers in 1975, this book was the first time they were able to see themselves in science fiction. From Joanna's ardent striving for equality in a world that isn't interested, to Janet's deft and capable discharge of her many different roles and jobs, to Jeannine's inner monologue and back-and-forth with her mother about what she was doing with her life, to the ferocity of spirit and desire to exact vengeance that Jael encapsulates, there are so many aspects of womanhood that Russ just comes out and addresses frankly and directly. In The Female Man, there's no way to hide behind the narrative or pretend, like so many of James Tiptree, Jr.'s readers did, that the subtext isn't really saying *that.*

In Retrospect: Stylistically, this book is a challenge. I don't know how critics have parsed it into which literary movements, but to me, the style is postmodern in the same way that the works of Donald Barthelme or some of Kurt Vonnegut's works are. In Vonnegut's Breakfast of Champions, there's a moment where he writes himself, the author, into the book as he attempts to deal with the repercussions of his mother's suicide, and in Timequake, he seemed to not really want to write the novel, so he largely wrote about writing the novel. Russ' work here pre-dates those books by at least a decade. She writes herself into the novel, and out of it. Her character Joanna is both her and not her. The writing is elliptical and tangential, and seems less concerned with narrative than emotional clarity. And there are a lot of emotions the Russ is attempting to work through. So certainly, the style of the telling will be a barrier to some readers, as even contemporary experimental novels are. 

The closest we really get to a propulsive narrative happens in the last third of the novel after Jael gathers the other three Js together. This is also the most problematic section of the book. I'm not the right person to have a discussion about intersectionality, but I will say that as a contemporary reader, Russ' characterizations of the marginalized within Jael's gender segregated society made me feel icky. Given what I've already said about the style of the novel, it can be hard to pin down exactly what I think Russ was saying at the time of the writing about non-conforming individuals, but it didn't feel great. I had a bigger problem with those passages than I did with Jael extolling the virtues of killing all men.

I think that in the end, The Female Man is a profound time capsule of a moment in which feminism was undergoing a radical shift toward the mainstream, and as a book that asks more questions than it gives answers, it's still an important read. As a guy, reading this book provides both an analytical and empathetic framework for understanding not just other works by female authors in a broader context, but it also offers a window into moving through the world as a woman. Conversations that Russ presents from a party, or an evening out, I know I've heard before, but they are so cringe-inducing, I can only hope I've never been one of the participants.  

The stylistic experiments are probably less engrossing than they were when they were new, but they help anchor the book in an emotional now that still resonates, almost fifty years after the book was first written.

Analytics

For its time: 5/5
Read today: 3.5/5.
Wollstonecraft Meter: 8.5/10

Published by Vance K — co-editor and cult film reviewer at nerds of a feather since 2012.

Microreview [book]: Inhuman, by David Simpson

A solid sequel to the speculative sci fi Post-Human series!

Simpson, David. Inhuman. Post-Human Media, 2014.

Buy it here.

By the end of the first books in the series, things had gotten super intense. James Keats and the AI had assumed godlike powers, and driven off an army of trillions. It seemed to me that the series was dangerously close to the ‘no threat can possibly top that!’ moment, a moment, needless to say, that affects quite a number of series of this sort (as well as fantasy series, in fact). Once the world/universe has been saved from the likes of a demigod/ginormous army/etc., how can any plausible greater threat still be lurking, ready to jump out from behind a bush or whatnot in book five?

I was surprised to find Simpson manages to postpone that moment, and delivers quite a worthy opponent/crisis in this, the fifth book. Best of all, Inhuman combines the most interesting elements of the outlying fourth book (the one about the AI’s ethical test) with the ongoing implications of Craig et al’s actions earlier in the series. In this installment, we learn more about the nature of the ‘multiverse’, an idea that everyone seemed to have forgotten about after Craig’s little venture into alternate universes in book one, and begin to suspect the true archenemy is someone even worse than One. That’s about all I can say about the content without spoiling stuff; suffice it to say, this is an entertaining tale that will keep you turning pages.

But how will you react to the end, I wonder? Because this is the ‘Empire Strikes Back’ effect times a trillion: going from a high point (the endings of books three and four) to a dark valley until, presumably, the sixth book delivers a happy resolution of some kind. Here’s the problem, though: at the end of Empire Strikes Back, a happy ending to the overall series seemed a bit unlikely, but certainly not implausible, since the rebels were mostly still alive and the main characters had even learned some valuable lessons, arguably, in how to face the superior power of the Empire. At the end of Inhuman? Not to spoil it, but a whole lotta farms have been bought! How can one realistically hope and expect a happy resolution when things have reached such a bleak point?

“But maybe Keats et al will pull off another wildly improbable ‘do-over’ and save everyone!” you might say, and based on the series so far, I’d be inclined to agree this sort of deus ex machina is quite likely to occur. But hasn’t that dead horse been beaten enough? Seems like every few hundred pages in the series all hope (and everyone alive) is lost, only for a miraculous reset to erase all that suffering and death and make it as though it had never been. ‘O Death, where is thy sting’ indeed! I am not a huge fan of this sort of deus ex machina in the best of circumstances, and seeing it used repeatedly in the series hasn’t made me any sweeter on the idea. For one thing, characters that had been mercifully dead keep popping up…

And while I’m venting about the false notes in an otherwise entertaining and even thought-provoking series, let me just say: why do most people seem convinced that, barring extraordinary circumstances, an artificial intelligence will “inevitably” be a mustache-twirling supervillain? Oh, I admit that sort of thing is surely a possibility, but not a very well thought-out one: why would a being with the knowledge of the (multiple) universe(s) at its incorporeal fingertips decide to wipe out all life 99.99% of the time?

In any case, things are looking bleak for our intrepid band, and despite the ranting above, I’m quite curious as to how Simpson will manage to top the ‘darkest hour’ feel of book five and sustain tension and interest in book six!

The Math:

Objective assessment: 7/10

Bonuses: +1 for expertly weaving together elements of the very different storylines of books 1-3 and book 4 into a newly integrated structure

Penalties: -1 for taking the darkest hour feel to a soul-sucking new low and signaling to the audience that a(nother) ‘do-over’, deus ex machina style, is going to be in the works in book six

Nerd coefficient: 6/10 “Flawed yet good, but did I mention flawed?”

[Six ain’t bad: it’s not as low as it sounds, as you can see here.]

This message brought to you by Zhaoyun, skeptic of gods out of the machine since forever and contributor at NOAF since 2013.

CYBERPUNK REVISITED: Accelerando by Charles Stross

Dossier: Stross, Charles. Accelerando (Ace, 2005)

Filetype: Book.

File Under: Cyberpunk Legatee

Executive Summary: Accelerando is a generational story, starting with Manfred Macx and following his descendents. Welcome to posthuman Earth. Macx is an idea man who gives it all away to escape his ex-fiancee. He lives half inside his own mind, and half through his computer agents, that are always bringing him fresh information through the internet. He lives on the cutting edge of computing, AI, corporate structure, and law. He’s always connected and he is the future of humanity. However, the future learns that exchanging humanity for efficiency comes at a cost.

High-Tech: From the start, Macx is simply more connected. His computer is wearable, and he receives all his information through a visor not unlike a souped up Google Glass. He’s largely accompanied by his cat, Aineko, which is an artificial cat that becomes increasingly intelligent. However, the story moves quickly into external minds, collective intelligences, wetware implants, artificial intelligences, simulated human existence, living corporate entities, nanoconstruction, planetary terraforming, the singularity and weakly godlike intelligences.

Low-Life: While most of humanity is riding the posthuman train to the singularity, there are some holdouts, largely concentrated in the highly religious populations. They reject implants and genetic manipulation. They prefer to do things the old fashioned way. There aren’t many of them, and their numbers diminish as the decades pass.

Dark Times: Early on, Macx learns that having your memories stored outside your own mind, such as a wearable computer, makes them susceptible to larceny and leaves Macx utterly helpless. However, this is a small problem when compared the challenges of uploading an entire race into the cloud. To say more would give it away, but let’s say that the challenges we face with our computers (not enough hard drive space, internet too slow, hardware out of date before you unpackage it) apply to humanity.

Legacy: Accelerando is a visionary depiction of the future as envisioned by Stross following the dot-com bubble. Reading it today feels as if he wrote it yesterday, and it’s a decade old. It’s a dinosaur in technology time. It won a Locus Award in 2006, and was nominated for best novel in the Hugo Awards, an Arthur C. Clarke award, and a BSFA award. His novel, The Rapture of the Nerds, is a not only a phrase that appears in Accelerando more than once, but a continuation on some of the ideas. Though its legacy is shorter than most novels we’ve discussed, it’s clearly a book that will be relevant for quite a while.

In Retrospect: I did this backwards. I read The Rapture of the Nerds a year ago, and Accelerando for the first time this month. Still, Accelerando is dense with jargon and buzzwords. It’s kind of hard to read unless you’re a real dork for computing and information technology. Fortunately, I am a real dork and the ideas don’t escape me even if the descriptions do. Stross has somewhat infamously cancelled a pending novel for being too close to reality after the Snowden files started being published, and I think he would’ve done the same for Accelerando if he wrote it today. 

For some perspective, this is the augmented reality future to Neuromancer's virtual reality future. The world Stross builds is instantly recognizable when you read about people who feel like they can't live without their cellphone, or how a smart watch is going to change their life. Most people don't want to stick their head inside a heavy virtual reality visor. They're fine with just having their life generally improved by having information at their fingertips. Don't get me wrong, I love the cyberspace, meta reality future as much as anyone, but Accelerando's future seems much more plausible.

Unlike most novels that would dump someone in an unfamiliar world, there is no reader avatar in Accelerando. This isn’t a problem though, as the near future Macx lives in is so close to our reality that it’s not hard to get on board. As the story progresses, it takes leaps and bounds by decades. We’re filled in, as readers, by a narrator that gives us a timedate stamp and brings us up to speed with the world as a whole. However, when many of the characters can exist in emulated realities, it can be hard to keep track of when, where, or what they are.

And even though the galaxy is on its fast ride to utter consumption, this isn’t the dystopian hellscape that most cyberpunk futures depict. It’s bright and sunny in its own ways. The dark clouds over it are dinosaur legal infrastructures, the economy and your mom. If you can get past the jargon, it’s a story that’s more relatable than some science fiction as it picks you up gently, and throws you into the sun.

Accelerando is available for free in many, many formats under a Creative Commons license.

Analytics

For its time: 4/5
Read/watched/played today: 4/5
Cybercoefficient: 8/10

***

POSTED BY: brian, sci-fi/fantasy/video game dork and contributor since 2014 

Microreview [film]: Kite, directed by Ralph Ziman

Delicious Dystopia Blessedly Free of the Sexploitation of the Original, but Lame Main Cast...

Kite, dir. Ralph Ziman. Anchor Bay Entertainment, 2014.

In theaters/on iTunes October 10th.

There are two kinds of people in the world: those who have seen Umetsu Yasuomi's 1998 anime Kite, and innocents. I'll let you piece together what I mean.

That isn't to say that nothing about Umetsu's anime was good; atmospherically it was a dystopian blast. But whatever enjoyment innocents might have squeezed from that anime was quickly strangled by the anime film's truly shocking—and graphic—sexual exploitation. It truly is not for the faint of heart!

So my expectations were rather low for Ziman's 2014 live-action, Westernized adaptation of the 1998 anime, for two main reasons: 1) I feared they would try a similar sexploitation/borderline pornographic angle, and 2) I doubted the live-action film crew could capture much of the dystopian atmosphere of the original. 

Imagine my surprise when I found both my doubts and my fears unfounded! This version of the story has (virtually) none of the deeply unsettling child pornography-esque depravity of the 1998 anime, yet for all that managed to hang quite a convincing dystopian look on their near-future hellhole of a city and its people. Ziman et al 2, Zhaoyun 0.

But certain aspects of the film didn't quite live up to the surprisingly high production values associated with the visual aesthetic. In particular, the main cast, including Samuel L. Jackson, was a slight disappointment. Presumably they intended to disguise Jackson's character Aker's (corresponding to Akai from the original 1998 anime) evil nature, but the instant Jackson swaggered onto the screen everything about him screamed 'villain!' (and not even in disguise, really). 

The other two main actors, for the roles of Sawa and Oguri, had no on-screen chemistry, and the perverse side of me started rooting for Jackson and hoping he'd somehow drop a flying elbow's worth of beat-down on them because I was so annoyed with their whining and with Oguri's indeterminate quasi-Australian accent. There was no ethno-cultural specificity to any of the main cast, and while I'm sure the filmmakers were pushing for a sort of mongrel hodge-podge Blade Runner-ish megalopolis, that angle fell flat while the supporting cast, most of whom were from South Africa, ironically managed to make the story come alive. Main cast 0, Character actors 1.

You know a good guy lacks charisma when you find yourself screaming at the bad guy, "Just shoot him!"

So in conclusion, Kite is quite an entertaining film, with a few good action sequences, a fine supporting cast and great production values vis-a-vis dystopian atmosphere as well as some nifty special effects scattered like pearls throughout. Unfortunately, those pearls were scattered among the swine, so to speak, of a weak main cast, a plot so predictable we all know what's what about three minutes in, and the considerable (though by no means unwelcome!) oddity of remaking an animated film notorious for its extremely explicit sex scenes and removing, well, all the sex. Is Kite great? No. But it's "pretty good", and you can take that to the bank! (Whatever that means!)

The Math

Objective assessment: 6/10

Bonuses: +1 for great dystopian atmosphere (and special effects eye candy), +1 for fine supporting cast, +1 for removing the deeply troubling sexploitation angle

Penalties: -1 for stripping away the core of the original (i.e., the deeply troubling sexploitation angle), -1 for a mediocre trio of main cast members

Nerd coefficient: 7/10 "An enjoyable experience, but not without its flaws"

[Stop right there, furious would-be (character?) assassins! Here at NOAF, a 7/10 means Kite is well above average, teetering on the edge of really good-ness!]

Warning: read NOAF regular and sf/f aficionado Zhaoyun's reviews at your own risk, as razor-sharp wit like this can, to quote The Running Man, slice you limb from limb into quivering, bloody sushi! Or at any rate, its opinionated-ness (man, that's a lot of i's, o's and n's! Who knew that 'opinion' minus 3.14159 = 'onion'?) can leave you mildly annoyed...