How Marvel Ruined One of Its Best Villains

This is Marvel's Age of Ultron, the second of the mainline Avengers crossover films. It features some great action sequences, fantastic character work, and some critical world-building for the MCU's overall progression. And yet, it was maligned at the time of release and today is viewed as something of an underperformance. Despite this, there's a lot to like about Age of Ultron, particularly the titular character. Simply put, he's Marvel's most misunderstood villain. My vision. They really did take everything from me. Inarguably, the MCU's greatest strength is to take obscure characters from the depths of Marvel comics, dust them off, and present them to the viewing public in new and interesting ways. This process has yielded numerous successes and beloved cinematic icons, and Ultron could have But he just wasn't. And yet, all the raw materials are there. The guy has an interesting backstory, a plan that serves as a perfect foil to our intrepid heroes, and a PhD in haterism. Case in point, in this climactic scene in Age of Ultron, we see Ultron talking to Natasha about his evil plan to destroy the world. I wasn't sure you'd wake up. I hoped you would. I wanted to show you. We've seen this scene a hundred times before. It's your standard mustache-twirling, grandiose monologue. But in this version, it's imbued with a slightly unconventional approach. The creature at the center of this evil plan is fueled by hubris, as all good villains are, but it all stems from pain. The way Ultron pauses momentarily and says, I don't have anyone else. is so subtle and compelling. It shows just how lonely and sad he is. His desire to be beautiful and to herald in a new status quo for humanity is such a great way of communicating his megalomania to the audience, and it's connected back to his personal pain by the way he says, I was meant to be beautiful. This is great writing. It's tying his personal interior pain to an exterior pain that he blames on the Avengers, and his desire to cause all of humanity pain as an act of revenge. A simple, clear, emotional throughline. Ultron talks about how he thinks of himself as a meteor, something that's going to change the course of human history. It's such a well-crafted version of this trope-y moment that it elevates it to something emotionally resonant and narratively compelling. This is an example of just what can happen when you approach a story from a new and unexpected angle. The key to making Ultron work, and ultimately the downfall of the way Ultron was received culturally, all comes back to the writing by Joss Whedon. Leading up to Age of Ultron's release, Joss Whedon had been handed the keys to the Marvel Kingdom. He was widely credited as having truly made the MCU's most audacious project to date soar to box office success. His dialogue, action, direction, and character dynamics cemented the age of Marvel fandom, as having taken over the cineplex. Thus, he was named Marvel's chief creative consultant, and he was tasked with rewriting various scripts and helping to build out the universe by developing and directing the pilot for Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. However, it would be the second Avengers film that would be Whedon's grand return to the big screen. Early rumors about the subject of Avengers 2 thought that the masters of evil or HYDRA would be the villains of the film. Ultimately, it was announced that Ultron would be the primary antagonist, a move that sent most fans into a thundering, In the comics, Ultron was a psychopathic robot created by Hank Pym, aka Giant Man, a character that literally didn't exist in the Marvel Cinematic Universe at the time. Ultron wasn't widely known in the broader public. He wasn't a character that had a massive existing fanbase. He was B-list at best. Furthermore, the character doesn't have an easily communicable power set through character design. He's just kind of a robot. And yet, when it came time to debut the character in the initial teaser trailer, Whedon and Marvel had seemingly done the impossible yet again. Set to a haunting rendition of Disney's Ain't Got No Strings on Me from Pinocchio, Ultron was introduced to the world as a shambling, zombified robotic assailant that was coming for the Avengers' hearts. The teaser trailer effortlessly communicated in eerie darkness, something that was unfortunately missing in the final product. This character introduction is incredibly effective. It paints Ultron as a horror movie villain who sees himself as unfettered by the petty grievances that humanity is concerned with. It's great. Maybe too great, because these ideas kind of get lost in the finished film. But we'll come back to this. When it was released in 2015, Age of Ultron showcased the entropy of how Tony Stark's decisions from the previous films have spiraled out of control. What happens when superpowered beings meddle in global affairs? Eventually, things are going to have to come home to roost. The issue at the center of the film is Tony Stark's hubris. His desire to protect and keep people safe spirals out of control, and he creates an all-seeing army of robot Iron Man suits that act as a global police force. I see a suit of armor around the world. And then, of course, things take a turn for the worse when Ultron gains sentience after Stark and Banner use the Mind Stone to power this newfound defense network. As he's set up in the film, Ultron is positioned as a Frankenstein's monster, with Tony as his reluctant victor. You think I'm one of Stark's puppets, his hollow men? Look at me. Do I look like Iron Man? Stark is nothing! This moment where Ultron is talking to the claw and becomes irate at just the mention of Tony Stark's name is great character work. Ultron hates being compared to the mindless drones that Tony has created. He thinks of himself as being above all of us, and being compared to Tony, specifically to how Tony talks, makes him angry. The only problem with this scene is there's just not enough moments like this in the finished film. The destructive father-and-son relationship is there, but it needed to be mined more. It needed to be developed, and we needed more of Tony and his perspective on Ultron. In many ways, the theme of entropy could have been played out perfectly in their relationship. Tony is a former arms dealer who had a change of heart, and Ultron is a literal weapon who has become sentient. The theme writes itself. They should hate each other and want love from each other all at the same time. Between the idea of Ultron thinking of himself as an all-powerful Pinocchio, being a cool and impressive riff on Frankenstein's monster trope, and his monologue later in the film about how he's obsessing over meteors, there should be more than enough for an extremely exciting villain. But the character and the movie just weren't received as well as the first Avengers film. Age of Ultron was thought of as slightly underbaked and having too many moving parts, and the movie only pulled in $459 million domestic at the box office. That's still an ungodly amount of money, but you know how Disney is. Infinite profits, always. Finance is so weird. When reevaluating the film today, it's easy to see why people who loved Loki and were looking forward to Thanos felt a little let down by Ultron. While the story of Age of Ultron was a direct outgrowth of what had come before, the character feels slightly apart. Does he literally have a personal vendetta against Tony? Yes, but the film doesn't really mind that and develop him in the way it could. Also, the menace and atmosphere of that initial teaser trailer is almost nowhere to be found in the final film. Nothing in Age of Ultron has enough time to breathe, because it's trying to juggle five main Avengers, a supporting cast, introduce the vision, and then on top of all that, build up Ultron as a compelling and complex villain. Also, there's a 10-minute sequence of the film that has Tony and the Hulk fighting. Is it fun? Oh heck yes, but is it absolutely necessary? The jury's out on that one. Ultimately, there's just all these little details about the film that completely undermine Ultron and paint him into a corner. I don't know why, but Ultron flying a plane, even though he can fly, just looks dumb. It's giving Thanos copter. Speaking of weird stuff, I think Ultron's face is a huge component of why the film struggled. This is what he looked like in the comics. His mouth doesn't move, he's a robot, he has an iconic visual language to him, and this is how they chose to interpret that idea for his live-action representation? The mouth moves strangely, the face is too human, it's both too expressive and too robotic. They should have made him have a mask, just like Darth Vader, but that's not what happened. Ultron as a character deserves more love. He's a compelling antagonist with great motivation and could have been an all-timer, but the movie he was forced to be in has like 45 different plot lines and a creative compromise that you can feel from a mile away. Who knows, maybe someday we'll get another Avengers movie that properly mines Ultron for all his dramatic potential. Until then, we'll just have to be content with the fact that Marvel isn't going to have any more villains with masks to figure out. Oh.