In Avengers: Age Of Ultron, Earth’s Mightiest Heroes face their toughest opponent yet in Ultron, the renegade AI created by Tony Stark and Bruce Banner to serve as a peacekeeping force. But as actor James Spader explains, his powers come at a cost.
“Ultron is able to access anything technological, and anything that is available on the internet has become part of his stimulation and information and is embedded in his psyche,” says Spader. “I think that’s inclusive of even conversation. But it’s streaming all the time. He has an ungoverned access to it, and it’s constantly streaming into whatever processing chip he has in there somewhere. So it’s overwhelming and also inconceivable. He has powers and knowledge that are impossible for him to harness, and that mixed with a lot of hubris and psychopathic tendencies are formidable. Troubling. He’s too strong for his own good.”
For this and other reasons, Ultron has a cognitive dissonance that spins him to the point where he’s “bonkers.”
Director Joss Whedon muses, “He also becomes self-aware and sentient and knows everything all at once, and is privy to the internet, which means he is into everything and everybody’s ideas and everybody’s conflicts and everybody’s goddamn kittens. His so-called mission is to bring peace, but his way of doing it is to get rid of the status quo and maybe everybody else, because humanity is full of conflict. That’s just part of what we are.
“The idea is that the way to protect man is to control or even destroy man,” he continues. “At the same time, what I like about Ultron is that what’s also going on is that he has enormous issues about daddy and about the team, and the Avengers, who are in a way responsible for him. He thinks he’s doing the logical robot thing, but he’s full of rage and he doesn’t even know that. He’s not particularly sure what his plan is. He goes from thing to thing. He knows what he wants to do, but at the same time he doesn’t really know why he wants to do it. He doesn’t know he’s the biggest threat humanity ever faced.”
Avengers: Age Of Ultron will be in cinemas on 23 April 2015 in the UK and 1 May 2015 in the US. You can buy Avengers Assemble on Blu-ray for £15.51 from Amazon.co.uk. Get all the latest Marvel news in SciFiNow.
