Not everything in Marvel’s new movie is as it seems. In the Captain Marvel trailer, Brie Larson’s Carol Danvers punches a seemingly nice and innocent old woman. Here’s what to know about the shapeshifting skrulls and their place in Marvel Comics history.
In the first trailer for Marvel Studios’ long-awaited Captain Marvel, our hero, riding the bus, comes upon a nice old lady. Then she punches that nice old lady right in her nice old face.
Unexplainable! Unforgivable! Or is it? In the Marvel Universe, where the alien shapeshifters known as the Skrulls are around, even nice old ladies might not be very nice.
The above image might look like a ‘90s alt-rock band, but this is what skrulls look like in their true form: Green skinned, elf-eared aliens with striated chins (kinda like Thanos’ ). In Captain Marvel, Ben Mendelsohn ( Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, Ready Player One) plays a skrull leader known as Talos, seen above on the left.
Skrulls are one of the Marvel Universe’s most infamous alien races, and while they might not have the best starships or the biggest military in the galaxy, they do have one huge advantage: Every skrull can shapeshift, perfectly mimicking both animate and inanimate objects, up to and including people. Some elite skrull soldiers, those who have undergone heavy military experimentation, can even mimic superpowers.
In the history of Marvel Comics, the skrulls have been at war with an alien race known as the Kree for thousands of years. In the Cinematic Universe, we would know the Kree from when they were introduced in Guardians of the Galaxy with the characters of Ronan the Accuser — the movie’s hammer-wielding villain, played by Lee Pace — and Korath — Ronan’s underling, played by Djimon Hounsou. Both actors are returning to play decades-younger and less villainous versions of their characters in Captain Marvel. (You can catch Ronan in the trailer if you’re quick enough.)
The Kree-Skrull war has a lot of battlefields, and that’s how Earth and its superheroes became caught up in it, in the comics. Most famously, in 2008’s Secret Invasion event, it was revealed that Skrulls had been secretly kidnapping and replacing major Marvel characters for years, including Elektra, Black Bolt, Hank Pym, Spider-Woman and even Jarvis. It looks like that might be happening in Captain Marvel, too. Here’s another picture of Ben Mendelsohn in the movie — it seems that his Talos will be posing undercover as a SHIELD agent.
So as a seasoned member of Starforce, an arm of the kree military, it’s totally reasonable for Captain Marvel to punch a disguised skrull in the face. Unless, of course, that nice old lady isn’t a skrull. That would be embarrassing.
