Even before Avengers: Infinity War, Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige called Captain Marvel the strongest hero in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Today's Captain Marvel trailer just might prove that Carol Danvers' powers are truly that impressive. There's a moment where she looks like she's going Super Saiyan, and that's a pretty accurate description of Captain Marvel's binary form in the comic books.
In the final seconds of the trailer, the camera traces bursts of energy flowing from Captain Marvel's hands all the way up to her head. An orange aura emanates from her body and grows as the camera rests on her face. She looks straight at us. Her eyes fill with yellow light. IT'S AWESOME, but what's exactly happening?
How Did Captain Marvel Get Her Powers? Binary Form Origins
How Strong Is Captain Marvel? What Her Powers Could Mean For Thanos and Avengers 4
Captain Marvel's powers in the comics are pretty much all your favorite Avengers combined; superhuman strength, endurance, stamina, flight, durability, and a Spidey sense. Her binary form expanded these power exponentially; she could control heat and gravity and light and survive space and project energy in photonic form. At her most powerful, she's basically a living nuclear weapon, which is bad news for Thanos. Even more, her ability to travel through cosmic energies could potentially allow her to disrupt the space/time continuum and create inter-dimensional breaches.
While the trailer doesn't make clear how Captain Marvel gets her powers, it does imply that the explosion around 1:37 is involved, and teases some sort of additional alien experiment around 1:16. It's still unclear whether the Binary form is part of her powerset from the jump, or if that occurs after her first origin story. The timeline is confusing; the trailer suggests Captain Marvel is just a normal Air Force pilot when she's caught in the aforementioned explosion. She and Mar-Vell, who is a Kree disguised as an Earth scientist, both end up in space.
Either the explosion or experiments cause her to lose her memories, and maybe Mar-Vell convinces her that she's a Kree in order to protect her while she's in space. She joins Starforce, and as the Kree-Skrull war heats up, she learns more about Earth and starts to put together all the pieces of her disjointed past. She crash lands on Earth, and that's when she meets SHIELD agents Nick Fury and Coulson in the '90s.
That's our best take on Captain Marvel's film origin, how she gets her powers, and the extent of her abilities. Anything we missed? Sound off in the comments.
Uncommon Knowledge
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Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
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Autumn Noel Kelly started as a staff writer for Newsweek in 2015. She covers anything in the comic book world—TV ... Read more
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