Saw it yesterday with roomies , , & .

After mechanical genius/billionaire playboy/weapons industry mogul Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) is kidnapped by terrorists in Afghanistan and creates a super powered exoskeleton to escape. When he returns to America, he vows to make amends for what he's done in the past by announcing he's shutting down weapons production for his company and goes underground to create a more refined version of his super suit. This causes a power struggle between him and company co-owner Obediah Stane (Jeff Bridges), who does weapons deals under the table with the very same terrorists who kidnapped him. When Stark finds out, he uses his new suit to destroy the weapons himself and sends his assistant/love interest Pepper Potts(Gwyneth Paltrow) to uncover the rest of the shipment files from the company. When she hacks into the company computer, she finds out that it was Obediah who hired the terrorists to kill Stark in the first place, and that he had taken the plans from his original suit to reverse-engineer an entire army of super-suited soldiers. This leads to a dramatic final battle between a new-power-suited Obediah and Iron Man, Iron Man wins, Jim Rhodes (Terrence Howard) hints at becoming War Machine in the sequel, etc.

The plot and storytelling were pretty good. Downey made an excellent Tony Stark. The movie kinda lacked a good villain, seeing as how, to my knowledge there weren't really any notable villains in the comic. Also, I found it kinda ridiculous that it took Tony Stark months of practice to learn how to use his suit (as well as the cost of his lab and many of his cool cars), while Obediah could master his in five minutes.

It was a good movie, and surprisingly under-hyped for a Marvel comic Movie--I don't think there were any Pepsi or Burger King tie-ins to my knowledge. The only thing I really should tell you about the movie is that if you're one of those types that leave during the credits, you missed possibly the best post-credits surprise you'll ever see in any movie, ever; and you're stupid, and you don't respect movies, so you shouldn't go to see them ever again.