I don’t want to kill Ultron. He’s unique. And he’s in pain. But that pain will roll over the Earth.
Paul Bettany as the freshly minted Vision, speaking to the Avengers gathered in Tony Stark’s penthouse, Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015)
There have only been a handful of movies that I saw twice in a row on the same day, and Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015) was one of them. (I don’t remember why my wife and I didn’t see it together in the theater, but I probably would have only seen it once if she had been with me that day.) I saw the Age of Ultron twice for one simple reason: I love robots, especially sentient robots. I decided to get a degree in Cinema Studies instead of Robotics Engineering, so I won’t be building robots for fun soon. How much could a robot kit cost? A couple hundred bucks? Maybe I’ll put it on my Xmas wish list—but what I really want is to code a robot with sentience, and I think I might be a PhD or four short of building the superintelligent robots that freak people out.
The story of Age of Ultron (aka Avengers 2) is related to two of the oldest myths in the Western canon, the Myth of Prometheus and Pandora’s Box. Using the same scepter that Thanos lent to Loki in The Avengers (2012), Tony Stark and Bruce Banner try to program a sentient prototype superintelligent algorithmic ally to the Avengers, which would ideally help defend against the next interstellar attack, such as what Loki had brought to Earth in the first Avengers movie. What they created, instead, was Ultron, who had determined that humans could not evolve into a peaceful species, so he decided to replace them with a global population of him-selves. Tony and Bruce used technology they didn’t understand to create technology they didn’t know how to control—and once it was out of the box, they couldn’t put it back in.
Perhaps, I should make it clear why I refer to Ultron as he/him rather than it, and the reason is simple: James Spader voiced Ultron with what my ears interpreted as masculine-sounding male-robot voice. I do not have a problem with a non-binary gender dynamic, because I don’t consider the binary gender system to be valid. That noted, in this instance, Ultron sounds like a man-bot to me. There are indefinite number of methods that the Age of Ultron sound designers could have utilized if they had wanted to make a non-binary or genderless-sounding robot; for example, they could have layered Ultron’s line readings by FRIDAY’s voice actor Kerry Condon over James Spader’s line readings, which would have made it sound both male and female—or they could have used a genderless-sounding voice generated by a synthesizer and a vocoder talk box. Instead, they modified James Spader’s voice with some reverb. James Spader’s voice performance as Ultron was incredibly layered in Avengers 2; I don’t know how, but the deadpan delivery of his lines had such rich emotional texture, expressing hope, fear, or disgust with such minor tonal shifts. It was a revelation, a goddamned revelation!
I’ll have more to write about this tomorrow. Good night. Stay safe, stay healthy, stay inside. Peace.
Rosliw Tor Raekül 