Avengers: Age Of Ultron - 8 Things You Need To Know About James Spader's Ultron
5. He's Like A Child
Avengers director Joss Whedon is keen to make Ultron stand apart from his decades of villainous mechanical on-screen predecessors. He says the bad guy is not a creature of logic he's a robot who's genuinely disturbed. We're finding out what makes him menacing and at the same time endearing and funny and strange and unexpected, and everything a robot never is. Endearing, funny, strange and angry...sounds familiar... He's very young... He's immature, and yet has knowledge of comprehensive, broad history and precedent, and he has created in a very short period of time a rather skewed worldview, says Spader. Essentially, he's playing Ultron as a child, which makes sense. He's an artificial intelligence that's been self-aware for a short amount of time. In terms of mental development, a kid is what he is. From the sounds of it Age Of Ultron's villain is going to be the flip-side of the eponymous hero in Neill Blomkamp's Chappie, another self-aware android whose child-like nature leaves him susceptible to the influence of outsides forces and the advice of those around him. It's just in this case, Ultron sees the world around him not as a wondrous thing to explore and get excited about, but to burn to the ground and master himself. Which, as anybody who's seen a kid throw his peers off of a park structure so he's King Of The Castle, also rings true.
Tom Baker is the Comics Editor at WhatCulture! He's heard all the Doctor Who jokes, but not many about Randall and Hopkirk. He also blogs at http://communibearsilostate.wordpress.com/
