Iron Man 2

Apple (and now everyone else) has the Iron Man 2 trailer, already up:


http://www.apple.com/trailers/paramount/ironman/

Not much that hasn't been seen if you poked around for the Comic-Con footage, but looks pretty good. "New" money-shot is Iron Man and War Machine teamed up fighting what looks to be a bunch of other armored enemies (or are these full-on ROBOTS now? THAT would be pretty great.)

Obviously, hardcore geeks like myself are watching stuff like this looking for different stuff than most of the audience, who're likely just glad for the "yes, there's an Iron Man 2" factor. What might we be "looking for?" Why, "Avengers" crossover-clues, of course! So what's going through MY mind? Well...

First good listen to Mickey Rourke's Russian-accented dialogue for Whiplash. Digging the juxtaposition of the self-made hardcase baddie with the sleek, high-end good guy. More noteworthy, to me at least: Whiplash makes it clear he has a mad-on not just for Stark, but the Stark "family line." For the record: IMDB lists actor John Slattery as playing Howard Stark and also a role for "Young Tony Stark," so... flashbacks?

That's interesting, since the previous film also took time to mention that the elder Stark had been big in the morally-dubious military/weapons field, too; AND Stark's appearance in "The Incredible Hulk" indicated that he's been aware for some time of the WWII-era Super-Soldier program, i.e. the source of that serum that turns Tim Roth into The Abomination... which, for those without a devoted nerd in your life to point such things out, was marked with a scientist's name that "confirmed" that this is supposed to be the same stuff that gave Captain America his powers. So, I'm thinking: Is THIS (Stark Industries going back to WWII and possible involvement with Cap and/or the forerunners of S.H.I.E.L.D.) a big part of how they'll tie all this together? (Dear lord... if some fragment of Captain America turns up as the "tie-in tease" for this, I'll shit a solid gold brick.)

Also: No good look at Sam Rockwell as (apparently) the main bad guy, Justin Hammer. In the comics, Hammer is one of the Marvel Universe's endlessly-useful "weapon-making-bad-guys," an evil counterpart to Stark who's made gear for something like 70-80% of the supervillains. He also figures prominently in both the "Armor Wars" and "Demon In A Bottle" story-arcs, the two most-prominent ongoing stories in Iron Man prior to "Civil War." "Armor Wars," incidentally, involved Stark fighting bad/corrupted robots and robo-suits made by the army and others using his tech, which would make sense given the Senate scenes and the other robots/armors in the trailer. (I won't say what it is and advise you not to look, but the reliably-sloppy IMDB lists another specific Marvel character in the roster, though the listed-casting a certain scenes from this trailer lead me to conclude that someone has a wire crossed somewhere.)

Nice to see Nick Fury getting some trailer-love, and in addition Scarlett Johansson as Black Widow looks even better than I'd hoped for.