Now that you’ve hit replay a couple dozen times on Captain Marvel‘s second trailer—and possibly searched that eye-popping new poster for Easter Eggs a few times for good measure—we’ve got an in-depth breakdown of the teaser for Marvel’s next epic, starring Brie Larson as the ass-kicking human/Kree hybrid Carol Danvers. Captain Marvel launches into theatres on March 8, 2019.
Right off the bat, we get an explanation as to why noted superhero Captain Marvel was beating the absolute crap out of an elderly woman in the first trailer.
As expected, grandmother up there is actually a Skrull, Marvel’s resident shape-shifting alien race who are, more often than not, interested in invading the planet Earth and definitely always have beef with the more benevolent Kree. The Skrull seem to be the main villain of Captain Marvel—Ben Mendelsohn is playing one named Talos, and Ben Mendelsohn is always the bad guy—but it’s interesting to note that Lee Pace‘s GOTG villain Ronan the Accuser is also set to appear in the film and has been known to be pretty darn anti-Skrull.
The trailer digs deeper into just how human pilot Carol Danvers ended up among the Kree’s elite Starforce. (“Noble warrior heroes,” as Carol puts it.) By the looks of it, she crash-landed her jet somewhere incredibly smoggy—far too nasty-looking to be Kree homeworld Hala, possibly the Skrulls’ Tarnax IV, possibly just one of the dustier parts of Earth—and was found, initially, by the Skrull.
“Your life began the day it almost ended. We found you with no memory. We made you one of us,” says Annette Bening, whose exact role in the film is still a mystery. It appears she’s a pretty important person in Kree culture, someone who can explain to Carol just how she ended up on Hala, and why an alien race decided she was worthy of becoming one of them.
Carol’s begins by imbuing her with a life-saving transfusion of alien blood, a slight reworking of her origins in Marvel’s comics. According to Bening’s character, the Kree chose to accept Carol as one of their own in part because her amnesiac state made it possible for them to effectively remake her in their image, but what remains to be seen is just how forthcoming the woman is actually being with Carol.
If you pay close attention to the sequence of shots in the trailer, it becomes a little less clear what the exact timeline of events leading to Carol’s transformation is. Even though we’re meant to believe that Carol only gains her powers after the transfusion (that presumably happens on the Kree homeworld), there are shots of her bleeding blue while still wearing her Air Force jumpsuit, making it less obvious when in the movie that scene takes place.
One of the biggest tensions of the film appears to be Carol remembering, in flashes, her time on Earth as an Air Force pilot. “Something in my past is the key to all of this,” she says, although what exactly this is remains to be seen.
Lashana Lynch will play Carol’s Air Force buddy Maria Lambeau. In the comics, Maria first popped up in the pages of 1984’s Avengers #246. She’s the mother of Monica Rambeau, a future “Captain Marvel” herself as well as a member of the Avengers.
We don’t get much of Jude Law‘s Mar-Vell in the trailer, but he does seem to be a mentor and adviser of sorts to Carol on Hala. “You’ve come a long way, but you’re not as strong as you think,” Mar-Vell tells Carol. Rumours abound that Law is secretly playing a pretty pivotal antagonist role in the film—possibly even the villainous Yon-Rogg—but Marvel isn’t ready to play that particular card just yet, if ever, as Law is still rocking his green Starforce uniform.
While the first trailer kept Larson in the muted green of a Starforce uniform, here we have her exploding into space while wearing the modern red, gold, and blue costume we know from the comics. How she comes upon a kick-ass super-suit is still a mystery, but she is hanging around S.H.I.E.L.D. a whole lot in both trailers.
Really, though, the entire point of this second trailer boils down to those last two shots of Carol zooming around in space and introducing Nick Fury to her cat, Goose. In the comics, the cat’s name is “Chewie” and there’s more to him than meets the eye.
