'Captain Marvel' Trailer: Why Does She Punch That Old Lady?

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you know that the next big Marvel superhero movie is Captain Marvel, a kind of prequel to all the Avengers-centric movies, taking place in the 1990s, featuring a de-aged Samuel L. Jackson as agent Nick Fury, just as he’s getting started with the whole superhero business. On Tuesday, the first trailer for the Brie Larson blockbuster dropped, complete with Brie Larson dropping in on a literal Blockbuster Video in the ’90s. But, unless you’ve been following all the hardcore Marvel fan theories for a few years, you might be confused as to what is going on in this trailer. Is Captain Marvel a space alien? And why did she punch that old lady?

The short answer is this: the main bad guys in the new movie are called the Skrulls. Those are the green people. They’re aliens and they’re good at brainwashing people and also shape-shifting. Relevantly, in the comics, some versions of the Skrulls fought a war with the Eternals. Star Lord’s dad (Kurt Russell) was/is an Eternal. In fact, depending on how you look at it, the Eternals are just one branch of the Skrulls and the green versions are the Deviants, or, more obviously, the Reptilians.

Still confused? Here’s the deal even more simply: the reason Captain Marvel/Carol Danvers (Brie Larson) has lost her memory, is wearing green, and punching old ladies is because she was abducted by aliens called the Skrulls and brainwashed to do their bidding. OR, there’s a second option: the old lady is a Skrull, and Captain Marvel is an alien called a Kree and is punching the old lady for being a bad alien in disguise. Of these two explanations, the second one seems more likely because more nerds on the internet think it’s true.

In this movie, it’s very possible that the origin story of Captain Marvel will be connected to what happened in the Silver Age comics. In those storylines, an alien Kree character named Marv-ell went to Earth and took the form of a recently deceased human named Walter Lawson. So, even though Jude Law is set to play this character in the new film, it’s possible the Brie Larson we see in the trailer isn’t a Skrull, but instead, an alien called a Kree, which is the original alien race of Marv-ell, who is, bizarrely, a different character, from this Captain Marvel.

For now, we’ll just have to wait and see how this plays out. Place your bets: is the old lady innocent and Captain Marvel is brainwashed? Or is the old lady a Skrull and Captain Marvel an alien called a Kree?

Captain Marvel won’t be out until March 8, 2019. Until then, here’s that crazy cool trailer again.