Back in September, the first trailer for Marvel's next movie showed its eponymous hero Captain Marvel randomly punching a sweet old woman in the face. This was probably jarring for anyone not intimately familiar with the lesser known Marvel hero. And, in the new trailer for Captain Marvel, it opens with a pretty thorough explanation about why this happened.
"So Skrulls are the bad guys and you're a Kree, a race of noble warriors?" Samuel L. Jackson's Nick Fury confirms to Brie Larson's Carol Danvers as we watch footage of Captain Marvel and the old lady fighting on the train.
To be clear, this isn't just some badass grandma ninja, this is one of those Skrulls, which are an alien race of shape shifters that are at war with the Kree. In this new film, Danvers arrives back on Earth, where she's having memories of her mysterious past. Danvers is half Kree. And as Annette Bening's character explains, the Kree Starforce found Danvers and re-made her into one of them.
Much of the plot outlined in this new trailer appears to be drawing from The Kree-Skrull War, an Avengers storyline from the '70s. In this series, Danvers arrived back on Earth where she teamed up with the Avengers, who were drawn into the Kree-Skrull conflict (eventually finding out that some of the Avengers had been replaced by Skrull imposters).
While they don't get much time in this clip, the first trailer introduced a little bit of the Starforce, which includes Mar-Vell (Jude Law), Ronan the Accuser (who you might remember from Guardians of the Galaxy), Korath the Pursuer, Att-Lass, and Carol Danvers. What's interesting is, if this film is pulling from The Kree-Skrull War, this would explain how Ronan becomes something of a villain by the time the events of Guardians of the Galaxy unfold. In this comic series he betrays the Avengers and tries to help revert Earth back to prehistoric times to be used as a Skrull base.
Oh there's that cat in the trailer, too. Fans already think that's going to be what takes Nick Fury's eye. If Carol is willing to beat the shit out of an old woman, don't think she won't fight a small adorable kitten, too.
Matt Miller is a Brooklyn-based culture/lifestyle writer and music critic whose work has appeared in Esquire, Forbes, The Denver Post, and documentaries.
