With the arrival of Captain Marvel’s second trailer, there’s a hell of a lot to see and a cavalcade of new information about how Marvel’s mightiest captain is finally going to make her way to the big screen for the first time. Let’s dive in with a breakdown of the new footage, shall we?
As tends to be the case with early trailers like this, most of what’s being shown is presented with just enough context to keep things somewhat shrouded in mystery. But what the trailer lacks in explicit details, it more than makes up for with some truly gorgeous shots of Brie Larson’s Carol kicking all kinds of arse.
While most of this train shot was included in the first Captain Marvel trailer, Marvel seems to have picked up on the mild alarm caused by seeing Carol punch the hell out of an old woman. This time, it’s made perfectly clear that the woman’s a Skrull in disguise, one who is very capable of going toe to toe with the — ahem — noble warrior hero.
What’s interesting about Carol telling Nick Fury about her life as a Kree warrior is that she truly does believe herself to be from the Kree homeworld despite the fact that the trailer also shows us a number of glimpses of Carol’s earlier life on Earth.
Annette Bening’s as-of-yet unnamed character finally clears up at least a few of the questions surrounding Carol’s transformation that imbues her with her superpowers by explaining that her Kree-ness comes from 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.
Of course, this wouldn’t be a proper Captain Marvel film if Carol’s mohawk didn’t make an epic appearance and, amnesia or not, we’re going to see plenty of the pilot’s skills as she takes a vintage SHIELD Quinjet out for a test drive. As action-packed as the trailer is, it also does a solid job of establishing just how much of the movie is going to focus on the power structures of various planets’ militaries, something that serves as a reflection of the complexities of Carol’s identity.
What little we see of Jude Law’s character presents an interesting picture of a mentor who, despite presumably believing in Carol, still goes out of his way to tell her directly to her face that she isn’t as strong as she thinks she is, suggesting that the two will have a kind of falling out over the course of the film.
The trailer also gives us some new looks at the Skrulls led by Ben Mendelsohn’s Talos — who, unbeknownst to Nick Fury, has been posing as a SHIELD agent for some time and acting as his boss within the organisation. Despite all the noise Marvel made about wanting to make sure that the MCU’s Skrulls don’t resemble Thanos too much (see: those chins), they…kind of do? It’s nothing to be concerned about, considering that it’s more than likely most of the movie’s Skrulls are going to be using their shapeshifting powers in order to skulk around without being detected.
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.
Given the way that Marvel’s stakes have steady been raised with every film leading up to Infinity War, the studio really had to up its game with Captain Marvel. Judging from the fact that we’re going to see Carol blasting entire fleets of warships to smithereens with her energy projecting abilities, it feels safe to assume that the movie’s going to do that and then some.
Captain Marvel hits theatres March, 2019.