'Captain Marvel' Trailer Breakdown: Captain Marvel Goes Full Binary And More Details You Missed
The new Captain Marvel trailer dropped last night, revealing more about the highly anticipated Marvel Studios movie. Though much of the movie still remains a mystery, we've picked up more clues about Captain Marvel's plot and its hero, played by Brie Larson.
The film follows Carol Danvers, an Air Force pilot who became endowed with incredible cosmic powers and is now part of a cosmic team known as the Starforce. But upon her return to Earth, she realizes that there's more to her past than she realized.
The new trailer depicts Carol's search for answers, and perhaps something more sinister at play with the team of "noble warrior heroes" that she works with. Let's dive into the Captain Marvel trailer breakdown.
After we see a longer version of familiar sequence in which Carol beats up a Skrull hiding in the form of an old woman on the subway, we cut to Carol and Nick Fury on the road, as the newbie S.H.I.E.L.D. agent attempts to summarize Carol's whole mission.
"So Skrulls are the bad guys, and you're a Kree, a race of noble warriors?" Fury asks dubiously. "Heroes. Noble warrior heroes," Carol answers, before cracking a smile. I couldn't help but suspect that Marvel added a shot of Carol smiling early in this trailer to counteract all the dumb calls for a smiling Captain Marvel after the first trailer. She's not here to look pretty for you guys.
But here's where the big debate lies for the second Captain Marvel trailer: what color is Carol Danvers' blood? Now reworked to be a part-Kree hero, she would ostensibly bleed a bright blue color, but in this shot, and ones shown later, her blood seems to have a greenish blue tint. The only other Marvel character I can think of who bleeds green is the Hulk. Considering the revelation that Carol is not only part Kree but was engineered to be "superior," could she be a result of additional genetic engineering? Maybe some Skrull DNA is involved?
Or maybe the lighting is just weird here.
Here we see Carol in her Air Force pilot uniform, in the life-endangering event that endowed her with Kree powers. She's been struck by some weapon that emits some blue, crackling energy and lies helpless on the ground as someone in a green outfit approaches her.
This is what I was referring to with Carol's powers being more than just a cosmic accident. Here, she is being given Kree blood — which again, looks just a little greenish blue. Maybe it is just the lighting.
"Your life began the day it nearly ended," Annette Bening's mystery character tells Carol. "We found you with no memory, we made you one of us. So you could live longer, stronger, superior. You were reborn."
This is our first glimpse of the four-time Oscar-nominated star's unknown character, who has only been cryptically described as a "scientist" by The Hollywood Reporter. Based on her appearance here and what she tells Carol about making her "one of us," it seems Bening is playing some kind of Kree scientific authority, though some fan theories posit that she could be the Supreme Intelligence, the leader of the Kree empire, which usually takes the form of a giant sentient head.
Here we see Carol being blasted away by a massive explosion of blue energy — likely the one that envelops her in the earlier shot. She's in her Air Force uniform and we can see the wing of her aircraft underneath her, so this is probably the moment when Carol gains her powers.
The mohawk helmet!! The iconic outfit championed by comic book writer Kelly Sue DeConnick and made popular in her 2012 run of Captain Marvel is finally realized on the big screen, even if the colors are in the Starforce's color scheme.
It seems that Carol and Nick Fury's investigations aren't totally being done under S.H.I.E.L.D.'s official approval, as the two are seen commandeering an aircraft on Earth. Even though she's without memory of her past save for a few muddled flashbacks, Carol settles easily back into the controls — despite Fury's anxiety.
IS IT GREEN OR BLUE?
Ben Mendelsohn's Skrull baddie is seen here supposedly attacking Carol Danvers after she had her cosmic, life-altering accident that turned her part Kree. But curiously, his outfit is purple and doesn't seem to match the approaching figure we saw in the first shot.
If Carol was an Air Force pilot, why would her files be classified under S.H.I.E.L.D? Was the agency already aware of extraterrestrial threats in the '90s before the events of Captain Marvel? It seems like Thor wasn't the inciting event for the agency to investigate aliens after all.
"I keep having these memories. Something in my past is the key to all of this," Carol tells Fury, which leads them on a merry chase through classified files and restricted S.H.I.E.L.D. areas. But considering the pile of photographs and mementos, as well as Carol's melted dog tag shown here, this looks more like Carol's old house than a clinical archive room.
Here's a clear shot of Mendelsohn in his Skrull prosthetics, just because. And because he seems to know more about Carol than she does, egging her on with a cryptic, "Would you like to know what you really are?"
In what seems like a shot of Carol's training to be in the Starforce, she gets a verbal lashing from Jude Law, who is oddly mean here. "You've come a long way, but you're not as strong as you think," Law's mystery character says. Maybe his mean attitude is explained by his still-unknown (probably) identity.
And there he is: Ronan the Accuser (Lee Pace). The character made a splash when he appeared in some of the official stills for Captain Marvel, but it's still uncertain what part he plays in the film. The genocidal Kree warrior was a big villain from Guardians of the Galaxy, so it seems like he would also antagonize Carol, but that may be complicated by the fact that she is now part-Kree, too.
Marvel chief Kevin Feige has been teasing that Captain Marvel is the most powerful hero in the MCU, and here we can see why. Carol's full Binary powers are on display in this shot, making her look like she's going Super Saiyan — which is actually not far off from her abilities in this form.
When Carol goes "Binary," an identity introduced in the comics in the 1980s and the early 1990s, she is able to tap into the power of a white hole, giving her the ability to utilize all types of energy on the electromagnetic spectrum. This means she can move at the speed of light, breathe in space, and even control gravity to an extent. Those are cosmic abilities that exceed what any of the other Marvel heroes can do. She has since lost those powers in the comics, but it seems like in Captain Marvel she'll be able to access them, maybe as some sort of final form that had been untapped until now.
"I'm not going to fight your war, I'm going to end it," Carol declares, as we see Binary Captain Marvel in her mohawk element and iconic red, gold, and blue colors. Tell me this shot doesn't make you emotional.
Captain Marvel is not even out yet, but already her cat has stolen the movie, both in this new trailer and in the poster for which its butt went viral. But here's the thing: that's not a cat.
The furry "adorable" creature is named Goose in the trailer (in an apt nod to Top Gun), but it's likely that this is the Marvel Cinematic Universe version of Carol Danvers' fan-favorite pet, Chewie. In Kelly Sue DeConnick and Jamie McKelvie's comic book run, Chewie is revealed to be an alien known as a Flerken. On the outside, Flerkens look exactly like cats, but they have a few notable differences. For one, they lay eggs. Two, when they attack, a huge set of pink tentacles that emerge from their mouths. And lastly, they are highly intelligent beings that contain pocket dimensions inside their mouths, allowing them achieve dimensional travel — which could perhaps have something to do with Captain Marvel's absence until now. So yeah, that's a pretty powerful cat.