Bruno Calgaro Sandi (wolvesevolve)

Not bad Whedon. I came in really with no expectations...didn't realize who was directing really. Thought I'd hate Mark Ruffalo as Bruce Banner, but not bad, in fact I think this Avengers' CGI Hulk was the best of the three times they've tried creating it. Plot was pretty mediocre: Alien invasion led by Loki continuing the subplot common to the last couple Marvel films with the Tesseract, but the script by Whedon does take it to the level of decentness, entertaining banter and visual gags here and there, there is a fair amount of character development that helps Banner/Hulk and at least we had a little bit to work with for Black Widow and Hawkeye though they were the two weakest characters along with Thor who I guess due the storyline and script wasn't given much to chew on...otherwise the interplay of the actors all worked pretty well. Kinda hoped for even more shady stuff from SHIELD/Fury to really paint them a darker shade of grey, that Fury would not reveal the hidden agendas to "our heroes" but ah well. CGI Hulk I liked as mentioned before, as were all the action sequences pretty on par with Transformers to wow the kiddies. New York scenes played well into the city's character, and ending reminds one of our post-911 world we live in today.

So this is up there as the best Marvel movies made, with Iron Man (at least the first one, didn't see Iron Man 2), Capt America (IMO was very very well done, and I expected to pan it at least a little before going into the theater) and the X-Men films (minus X3). There as potential that this would be a mess, ensemble pieces are hard to pull off on the big screen in just two hours, but Whedon did just fine with the material and potential downfalls. Is this a masterpiece like what Nolan did with Batman/The Dark Knight? Nope. But solidly good and entertaining. Only groaned a couple times but well that's just what you do for most superhero movies anyways :P

Oh yeah and the Harry Dean Stanton cameo! LIKE
Much better than Stan Lee, who I almost thought was skippin out on his obligatory cameo for this Marvel film....but dammit he squeezed it at the end there :P

A fantastic character study of an Eastern European nurse tending to a temporarily blind severe burn victim upon an oil rig off of Ireland. Sarah Polley does an amazing job as always, convincingly portraying the nurse, of channeling the character as a survivor of the war in the Balkans...and Tim Robbins equally as fantastic as the burn victim that has emotional baggage...and great supporting cast to show what a strange place an oil rig can be, isolated from the rest of civilization, as if it's a beacon to folks with problems in their lives that they're trying to forget/escape.

Even as the all the characters are very distant to one another, we see that Hanna (Sarah Polley's character) in her own way delves into Josef's (Tim Robbins' character) life secretly...and eventually comes around to opening herself up to Josef just before they part ways, when he's helicoptered off for surgery.

It's really a poetic movie, very well acted and written, touching in how even those that feel they are without redemption can find peace.