The teaser trailer for 2019’s Captain Marvel movie has now dropped, and though there’s not a great deal of detail at this early stage, there are some tantalizing pieces of information in which we can start to put together Carol’s origin.

Like a lot of comic book characters, Captain Marvel has a long and complicated history, and part of the fun of a new movie is finding out what parts of her backstory will be kept, and what will be ditched. There’s an interesting part of the teaser in which we find out that her memories aren’t what they seem to be. Though brief, this gives us a lot of information regarding some specific moments in her comic book life.

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“I keep having these memories. I see flashes. I think I had a life here...but I can’t tell if it’s real.” The majority of Carol’s lines in the Captain Marvel teaser concern her past and her recollections of her past. In the comics, those memories -- or lack thereof -- play a pivotal role in the early career of Captain Marvel.

When Carol was the youngest security captain ever to work at NASA, she found herself involved in the adventures of Mar-Vell, the original Captain Marvel, and by association, she gathered some powerful enemies. It was on one of these adventures that she was knocked into a powerful Kree weapon called the Psyche-Magnetron, which altered her on a molecular level, giving her powerful new abilities and altering her DNA, making her essentially half-Kree in the process.

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This accident with the Psyche-Magnetron (possibly the device we see in the trailer) caused her to lose her job at NASA, as well as suffer from severe blackouts that would result in her personality switching between Carol Danvers and that of a Kree Warrior. This painful collision of memories was eventually reconciled by Carol, and when she worked through this transition she emerged on the other side as the superhero Ms. Marvel. This experience could be what the Captain Marvel movie is referencing, based on the footage from the trailer, but Carol’s experiences with lost memories don’t, unfortunately, end there.

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For a while, Carol is a member of the Avengers, until a traumatizing experience causes her to leave the team, and join forces with the X-Men. The circumstances under which she comes to join the X-Men are a pivotal moment in Carol’s history, and while she’s not an X-Men character, for a short time she was intrinsically linked to the team. Having moved to San Francisco to recover from her time on the Avengers, Carol found she couldn't sit idly by while danger was nearby, and steps in as Ms. Marvel to stop the new mutant villain Rogue from causing even more damage on the Golden Gate bridge.

Rogue’s main mutant power is the ability to absorb the superpowers of anyone she touches. Thus, during the battle, Rogue grabbed Carol, draining her of all of her powers, permanently gaining those abilities for her own. Worse than this, however, is that Rogue held on for far too long, causing Carol to lose all of her memories as well.

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Rogue attempted to murder Carol, leaving her for dead in the freezing water below. Ms. Marvel was rescued by the X-Men, and under the care of Charles Xavier was eventually able to reclaim her lost memories, although it took a lot of time. Even when those memories returned, she had no emotional connection to them. Rogue, now plagued with memories that aren’t her own, slowly began to turn away from the life of villainy, and she too comes under the care of Professor X. As time goes on, Rogue became one of the greatest X-Men of all time, thanks in part to Carol’s memories instilling a sense of morality and decency in her.

Carol spent more time with the X-Men, and over time regained her full powers, although she went through multiple superhero alter egos before finally becoming the Captain Marvel we know her as today. Being able to tie all of this together into a neat origin story for a movie, however, would inevitably be tricky. Perhaps the biggest hurdle would be the fact that Rogue cannot be a part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe yet, meaning Carol’s difficulties with her memories has to come from a different source. Thanks to the teaser trailer, how her origin will handle this is hinted at.

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Carol comes to Earth in the Captain Marvel movie convinced that she’s a Kree Warrior, perhaps calling back to her earliest memory problems due to her exposure to the Psyche-Magnetron. Thanks to her narration, we also know that she’s having flashes of a life on Earth, perhaps a veiled a callback to her time with Professor X following Rogue’s attack. It seems as though it’s Carol’s returning human memories of being knocked down and getting back up, time and time again, that will help Captain Marvel become the hero that Earth needs.


Directed by Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck from a script they wrote with Liz Flahive, Carly Mensch, Meg LeFauve, Nicole Perlman, and Geneva Robertson-Dworet, Captain Marvel stars Brie Larson as Carol Danvers, Samuel L. Jackson as Nick Fury, Jude Law as Mar-Vell, Clark Gregg as Phil Coulson, Lee Pace as Ronan the Accuser, Djimon Hounsou as Korath the Pursuer, Gemma Chan as Minn-Erva, Ben Mendelsohn as Talos, and Lashana Lynch as Maria Rambeau. The film arrives on March 8, 2019.