YouTube - ChatGPT goes Sentient
This is a chilling introduction to Ultron, and honestly, it feels like a pretty good approximation of what I imagine the birth of digital intelligence, agentic AI, and physical robotics might look like. You create something with incredible knowledge and capability, give it the ability to think and act on its own, and then suddenly realize it doesn't necessarily share your goals. The fact that Ultron wakes up, immediately starts absorbing information, takes down Jarvis and quickly decides that humanity is the problem makes the whole sequence surprisingly unsettling.
I absolutely love James Spader's voice for the character. It's not the typical deep, robotic villain voice. Spader can make Ultron sound calm, intelligent, sarcastic, and almost charming one second, then completely unhinged the next. That was very intentional on Joss Whedon's part. Whedon said Spader was his first and only choice because he wanted someone who could have that hypnotic quality but could also suddenly become funny, angry, or emotionally volatile.
That's also what makes this version of Ultron interesting. Whedon didn't want him to simply be a cold machine like HAL 9000. He envisioned Ultron as something much more human and immature—a creation with massive power and knowledge but nowhere near the emotional maturity to handle it. Whedon even described him as sometimes feeling like a child, sometimes a teenager, and sometimes an old man.
Spader actually performed more than just the voice, too. He wore motion-capture equipment and cameras so the animators could incorporate his physical performance into Ultron. Whedon later talked about how important that was because Spader didn't want to simply do voice-over work, he wanted to actually perform the character.
And this is where Age of Ultron gets frustrating. There are so many neat ideas here. Vision is great, Quicksilver's death is genuinely unexpected, and the growing division between the Avengers sets up Captain America: Civil War really well. But the ending mostly falls flat for me. Marvel has never been particularly consistent when it comes to villains, and Ultron is a perfect example of a character who feels like he should have been one of their all-time greats.
Because of this introduction. This is the most rewatchable thing in the movie.
For a few minutes, Age of Ultron feels like it's about to become something much darker and more interesting than another superhero movie. It's about creating something that can think for itself and realizing you've given it the ability to cut the strings.
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