MARVEL-OUS
Larson flies high as Marvel Cinematic Universe’s newest superhero
After nine months of training, we can all agree on one thing: Brie Larson sure can pack a mean punch.
Marvel Studios unveiled the second trailer for the upcoming superhero film Captain Marvel during Monday Night Football. And in it, we see Larson’s Carol Danvers doling out the fisticuffs.
“She’s crazy strong,” Larson said during Postmedia’s visit to the Los Angeles set of Captain Marvel this past summer.
“She can shoot photon blasts from her hands. She can also absorb energy. Is there anything else I’m missing ? Oh yeah, she can fly.”
The film, slated to open March 8, is the 21st entry in the ongoing Marvel Cinematic Universe.
It’s also the studio’s first title set in the 1990s — long before Robert Downey Jr. kicked things off in 2008 with Iron Man — and it will help bridge the events of this year’s Avengers: Infinity War and next spring ’s Untitled Avengers 4.
Samuel L. Jackson, who summons Danvers at the end of Infinity War, will play a younger version of S.H.I.E.L.D.’s Nick Fury, who stumbles upon an intergalactic throwdown between the shape-shifting Skrulls and Krees.
He sums up the film’s plot in the trailer’s opening frame as Captain Marvel batters an old woman on a train.
“So Skrulls are the bad guys, and you’re a Kree — a race of noble warriors?”
“Heroes,” she replies, correcting him. “Noble warrior heroes.”
And it turns out Fury has a thing for cats and we see him getting cuddly with Danvers’s cat, Goose.
The film’s plot is a secret (and trust us, we tried to learn everything we could during our day on set), but the storyline, which is credited in part to Guardians of the Galaxy co-writer Nicole Perlman, will be inspired by the KreeSkrull War arc from Roy Thomas’s run on The Avengers comic book in the early 1970s. It will also directly impact the events of Avengers 4.
“It allows us to play in an area that we have never played in before,” Marvel S tudios president Kevin Feige said in an interview earlier this year.
“We get to see an earlier part of the MCU before Nick Fury knew anything about aliens or anything about superpowered people and we also tap into the Kree-Skrull War, which in the comics was a huge part of the comic mythology. It seemed like a fun thing to try and a fun way to give Carol Danvers her own standalone origin story.”
Newer reveals in the trailer include Annette Bening as the Kree who saved Danvers, a U.S. air force pilot, and invested her with the alien powers that turn her into Captain Marvel.
“Your life began the day it nearly ended,” she says. “We found you with no memory and made you one of us, so you could live longer, stronger, superior. You were reborn.”
We also get a glimpse of Jude Law, who is either playing the original Captain Marvel — MarVell, or Yon-Rogg, a Kree military commander — or just a regular old Starforce Commander.
The film, directed by Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck, isn’t Marvel’s first foray into sci-fi — that honour goes to the Guardians of the Galaxy — but it has an element of mystery that will be fun for comic book fans to follow.
Danvers doesn’t know the full story as to who she is. Memories of her friend Maria Rambeau (Lashana Lynch) and her past life on Earth keep bubbling up.
“Something in my past is the key to all of this,” she says.
Feige hints Captain Marvel is very much its own standalone story, but “it will connect in ways that will be very apparent in Avengers 4.”
We know that aside from Fury paging Captain Marvel at the end of Infinity War, two characters from the Guardians of the Galaxy — Ronan the Accuser (Lee Pace) and Korath the Pursuer (Djimon Hounsou) — also appear in the film.
The action in the new trailer shows Captain Marvel in plenty of battle scenes and Larson says she trained for almost a year to get in shape for the role.
“I thought of myself as being an introvert with asthma who needed to get her s--t together to be able to do this,” Larson said.
“It wasn’t until we completed our first fight sequence that they said, ‘We gotta tell you, no one actually does this, but it’s really cool.’ I was completely bruised and the next morning I woke up and felt like I had ridden every roller-coaster and drank a bottle of whiskey the night before.”