Captain Marvel Trailer Confirms Starforce Fan Theory

The Captain Marvel trailer revealed that Carol Danvers is suffering from amnesia and can't remember her life on Earth - which would explain how she ends up working with the traditionally villainous Kree team Starforce. We recently theorized that Captain Marvel will partially adapt an arc from the comics in which Carol's use of her powers triggers a brain hemorrhage that results in massive memory loss. If Jude Law is (as we believe) playing the Kree villain Yon-Rogg, he may well have used Captain Marvel's memory loss as a means to recruit a powerful being onto the Kree side of the Kree-Skrull war.

In Kelly Sue DeConnick's recent run of Captain Marvel comics, Carol began to experience headaches and wooziness when she used her powers. A brain scan revealed that she actually has a third lobe in her brain, sandwiched between the left and right lobe, which controls all of her powers. Every time she used her powers (in particular, the power of flight) a lesion on the third lobe would grow, causing brain damage. Captain Marvel tried to swear off flying, but when Yon-Rogg returned and attacked Earth, the only way to stop the total destruction of New York City was for her to fly into space. She did so, causing the brain hemorrhage and sacrificing her memories in the process.

It's likely that Captain Marvel will streamline this story arc, most likely by having Carol lose her memories when the Psyche-Magnetron (the Kree device that gives her powers) explodes. In the trailer, we see Carol in her US Air Force uniform, seemingly having crash-landed in a large clearing. We see her in this same location and outfit getting hit by a blast of energy from the exploding Psyche-Magnetron. It's unclear whether she'll get her Binary powers (of energy absorption and projection) from this accident as well, but we do know that she'll acquire those powers at some point in the movie.

In the comics, the blast from the Psyche-Magnetron gave Carol Kree physiology and abilities because it passed through Mar-Vell (the original Captain Marvel) and imbued her with his genetic structure. Law's character will presumably be present at the explosion in the movie and unwittingly gift her with his Kree genes. If Yon-Rogg were to find himself with a superpowered Carol Danvers who has no memory of her past life, it would be an easy thing for him to make up a backstory for her and convince her that she's a Kree soldier. At one point in the trailer we see Carol wearing a Starforce uniform and held upside-down in a machine that's firing electricity into her brain, so it's possible that her memories will be forcibly taken, rather than lost in the accident.

We can be reasonably certain that Captain Marvel will streamline Carol's backstory from the comics, since she didn't even take up the mantle of Captain Marvel until fairly recently, and has decades of history preceding that. She's also held the superhero titles of Warbird, Binary, and Ms. Marvel, and her greatest powers weren't acquired in the original explosion, but were the result of experimentation by an alien race called the Brood. If the movie can not only rework her origins to make them simpler, but also add an intriguing new element of Carol being tricked into fighting for the enemy, it could prove to be a strong debut for the Marvel Cinematic Universe's most powerful hero.