On Monday night, Marvel released a new trailer for Captain Marvel (and if you haven’t watched it go watch it now). It highlighted the power Carol Danvers aka Captain Marvel (played by Brie Larson) can wield, space battles and S.H.I.E.L.D. It also hinted at the character’s origin story with a few choice bits of dialogue. Finally, the trailer offered a few sneak peeks into the film’s storyline of Carol’s return to Earth in search of her true identity. Of course, the trailer still favored its need to tease over explicitly telling us much, but we gleaned some great info from the 2 minute and 18-second preview. Here are five things the trailer made clear.
Captain Marvel’s Origin Story
“Your life began the day it nearly ended,” a character tells Carol. The second Captain Marvel trailer seems to reveal just how Carol Danvers winds up a member of Starforce, a group of elite Kree soldiers. The trailer hints that a devastating crash will be part of Captain Marvel’s MCU origin story. It looks as though the U.S. Air Force detected at least one UFO, and sent airforce pilot Carol Danvers to check it out. She was soon caught in a dogfight with at least one alien vessel. While there’s likely a lot more to this part of the story, the presence of Skrulls at the crash site suggests Carol stumbled into a battle between Kree and Skrull starfighters. After crashing Carol is then approached by an unknown figure, clearly intended to be one of the Kree. The trailer sets elements of this crash up as a major mystery, and it’s hardly a coincidence that the identity of the Kree who discovers Carol is obscured.
Captain Marvel Lives Longer & Stronger
The Captain Marvel trailer neatly explains the supposed plot hole of why Carol won’t have aged between the events of Captain Marvel (set in the 1990s) and Avengers 4. Bening’s character explains that the Kree transforms her into one of them so “she could live longer, stronger…superior.” The transformation, it seems, will be on a genetic level at least partly through blood transfusion. The scene seems to suggest that Carol Danvers’ DNA could have been messed up after the explosion, but the Kree experiments are the moment where Carol Danvers’ DNA is rewritten by alien science.
The Skrulls Are Also Involved in Captain Marvel’s Origin
As previously discussed, Carol’s plane crashes because she’s checking out a sight of a UFO on behalf of the U.S. Air Force. The UFO turns out to be an air battle between the Skrulls and Kree. However, it seems that the Skrulls are even more involved with her origin. The image above shows Captain Marvel subjected to unknown experiments with some energy racing through her brain. This was shot in the first trailer, and was at the time believed to be a Kree memory-modification device; the voice-over at this point seems to imply that’s true. However, the second trailer provides a wider angle which shows a Skrull–not a Kree–to the right of Carol. This raises a lot of unexpected questions. In the comics, the Kree and Skrull have worked together on experiments. Or perhaps the Skrull is just a spy who snuck into a Kree base to see what is being done to Carol. Skrull leader Talos (Ben Mendelsohn) certainly tries to convince Carol that he knows exactly what happened to her. Talos temps her to join the Skrulls with the question of, “Would you like to know what you really are?”
At the same time, however, the trailer also seems to show that Carol’s powers are evolving, or that somehow she leveled up between firing energy from her hands to unlocking the power of Binary. Perhaps Captain Marvel will wind up captured by the Skrulls who also conduct their own experiments on her. The machine on display is a device used in Uncanny X-Men #163 to try to evolve her powers. If this is the same machine as in the comics, the Skrulls may just have helped Carol unlock the power of Binary and thus become the strongest MCU character to date.
Carol Danvers Remembers Her Life On Earth
Carol notes that “I keep having these memories…I see flashes…I think I had a life here but I can’t tell if it’s real.” The trailer cuts to flashbacks of her time on earth. It seems the Kree or Skrulls efforts to erase her memory has failed and her mind is desperately attempting to remember. Carol is recalling key events from her past in several eras, such as her as a young girl driving cars and playing on the beach, and as an adult flying. Carol’s flashbacks seem to confirm that Captain Marvel will draw heavily upon Kelly Sue DeConnick’s story run. DeConnick’s iconic run focuses on Carol’s love of flying and the need to go higher, further and faster. Carol grows up in a suburb outside of Boston and spends her summers playing on the beaches in Cape Cod, as the shots of young Carol on the beach confirms.
Captain Marvel Doesn’t Start Wars, She Finishes Them
One brief scene in the trailer shows Carol attacking Kree soldiers, revealing a major change of allegiance. The hero seems to be in another Kree experimental changer and then drops to the ground, hitting Kree with a stunning radial blast. Later on in the trailer, Carol tells a character off screen, “I’m not gonna fight your war, I’m gonna end it.” This is the moment when Captain Marvel rejects her tangled history with the Kree and Skrull and embraces her heroic side as a peacekeeper and protector of the skies. She wants to bring an end to the war between the Kree and Skrulls. This moment may also hint at the biggest mystery surrounding Captain Marvel’s sudden appearance in the MCU. Where does the hero go after 1995 and why hasn’t she helped the Avengers before? It is very possible that she heads into space (as seen in the final shot of the trailer) fully empowered to attempt to end all Kree’s wars. If that’s the case, the MCU may have already subtly acknowledged Captain Marvel’s importance in the MCU. In Guardians of the Galaxy, set in 2014, the Kree have just ended into a historic peace treaty with the people of Xandar. That may have been thanks to Carol Danvers.