While I don't think this post will have any big spoilers for the plot of Avengers age of Ultron, it will have a lot on my thoughts on the movies villain, so I suggest you not read this until after you have seen the movie, even if only because it won't make much sense. And it will probably still spoil enough to annoy you. Yes, you, I'm talking to you. You have been warned.
Ultron scared me. He didn't creep me out, he wasn't especially freaky as villains go, but the idea of him scared me. At first glance he might seem like your cliche robot genius, but upon further inspection he is really the scariest robot villain I may have ever seen in a movie.
Because in other stories, even the artificial intelligence robots make sense in their actions. They are usually emotionless, calculating, planning. They are robots. Ultron scared me because he is a robot that I cannot relate to at all in any of the senses I normally relate to a robot.
But I can still relate to him. And that scares me.
Unlike other robot villains I've seen, Ultron will usually act upon his emotion. Emotion is something most robots don't have, and even when they do in stories, almost always something held in check, hidden by a blank face and glowing stare. Ultron made little to no effort to hide his emotions.
If you know me in real life, you probably know that I don't deal very well with the emotions of others. Not in the way that I react badly to it, but in the way your average highschooler doesn't deal very well with their math homework. I don't understand it, and see no reason it should exist, much less be upon my shoulders to achieve something with it.
It's not that I don't have emotions, I just don't let most of them surface, because I see no reason to let them and I have the power to stop them.
So back to Ultron. He is more than an artificial intelligence, because he not only has the ability to think freely, he has the ability to feel freely.
Some see Ultron's plan as a gaping plot hole. After downloading himself into the internet, (spoiler alert!) he could of caused so much destruction then. But he didn't.
I think this is intentional. He knows so much from being able to download it. He knows not only facts, but he knows stories. He knows that in stories, both sides have a chance. Hope is at the center of all stories, for both sides.
I think Ultron doesn't care about winning. He cares about the fight. He could have nuked avengers tower, done. If he was being stricly logical, he would have done that. But that would have boring.
He wants to earn his win. He wants to prove himself, to himself.
I think what disgusted himself about the human race was the same things that disgusted him about himself. I remember him talking very little about how weak they were, though there was some.
I remember how he talked to the Avengers a lot about how they were monsters, how they were evil and deserved to lose. They were monsters. And he made a point.
They were monsters because they created him. He knew that he was a monster. But he knew because he knew the humans were a race of monsters, and he was like them.
The insane, evil, twisted, destructive, maniacal, villain thought he was like a human. And that's scary. Because I think he was right.
But he's not exactly like a human. He's a robot that was given the gift of humanity; the gift of free choice.
The entire movie, he's playing with that gift. He knows what he would do if he were still a machine, so he acts in spite of it. He is amazed at this gift, yet fears it. He fears it, because he knows everybody else has it as well.
In the beginning, God gave us free choice. Then he gave us a rule. The first humans, Adam and Eve, used their free choice to break the rule. Because they wanted to. Emotions.
Free choice is an amazing gift. It let's us choose our side. We can help, or we can harm. It is what let's responsibility exist.
Robots have no responsibility because they have no free choice. They must do as they are programmed to do.
Emotions are an amazing gift. They let us react to free choice. Ours or other's choices. It's what makes responsibility matter.
Robots have no responsibility because they have no emotions. They can not fathom why anything other than what they are programmed to do would matter.
Ultron has free choice. Ultron has emotions. And he uses them to make the wrong choices. Like humans sometimes do.
Ultron is a genius, he has more knowledge than every human. He knows the choices he's making are
bad. But he makes them anyway. Like humans sometimes do.
That's what scares me.
What makes good villains scary is not the death stars or or doomsday devices, but their humanity. When you see someone doing horrible acts of evil, and you relate to that person, that is what is truly scary.
I'm not going to end on that note. Because there is another side of the coin. The by product of free choice and emotions is something else: Hope.
People can be the bad guys, because they are human. But people can also be the good guys. Because they are human.
Robots are neither good guys or bad guys. They can't be. They simply act upon their programming. They have no hope.
We are humans, and we have hope. I think that is what scared Ultron.
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