Captain Marvel‘s first trailer dropped today and well and truly shook the internet. It gave Marvel fans a whole lot to chew on, too, concerning what the first female-led MCU movie will feature, and one intriguing element of the narrative that it teased is that Brie Larson’s heroine will be suffering from amnesia when the film opens.
It’s already been revealed that the flick won’t be your standard superhero origins story, and will instead begin with Carol Danvers already possessing her enhanced abilities and part of the Kree military squad Starforce, commanded by Jude Law’s commander (don’t call him Mar-Vell). If whatever happened to Carol that gave her her powers wiped her mind of her past, it looks like Captain Marvel will feature the character finding out her origins alongside the audience.
This is somewhat original to the movie, but it does have its root in the comics. In the source material, Carol got her abilities when she was turned into a human/Kree hybrid after being exposed to the Psyche-Magnitron Machine. The result of this was that she developed two distinct personalities. Much like Bruce Banner and Hulk, Captain Marvel would take over when superhero’ing needed to be done and then she would switch back to regular old Carol afterwards, with no memory of her other half’s activities.
Eventually, this element of the character was dropped and Carol’s mind was made whole again. The amnesia storyline in the movie appears to be the screenwriters paying homage to this part of the hero’s early years then, while still giving it their own twist.
It makes sense, too, as the MCU has never been very interested in secret or dual identities, but it does have a fascination with having its characters discover new things they didn’t know about their pasts (Ant-Man, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, any Iron Man film, etc.). Whatever route the writers have chosen to head down here, though, you can be sure that Captain Marvel‘s origins will be revealed when the 1990s-set prequel arrives on March 8th, 2019.