What is the Kree-Skrull War and How Will it Figure Into CAPTAIN MARVEL

Matt Key

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At San Diego Comic Con this past weekend, Marvel Studios President Kevin Feige made an unexpected announcement about the Captain Marvel movie — it would feature Carol Danvers (Brie Larson) fighting Skrulls in the early 1990’s.

What!?

We had all expected a villain like Yon-Rogg or the Supreme Intelligence, and certainly we may still get those characters — but the Skrulls? Not to mention, in an interview with IGN following the event,  Feige said, “… there’s an entire section of our comics that deal with the Kree-Skrull War and we haven’t tapped into that at all. And we thought that would be an amazing, huge portion of mythology to belong to Captain Marvel.”

So, we’ve got a Captain Marvel origin story that finds itself wrapped up with the Kree-Skrull War and, though Feige did not say that this fight would transpire on Earth, it seems like a safe bet that it will at least start here; this, for us, brings in the possibility of the 2007 Secret Invasion storyline. This storyline saw that the Skrulls, an advanced race of intelligent, war-mongering, shapeshifting aliens, were slowly infiltrating all aspects of human life — government, military, science, business — even the Avengers, X-Men and so on — all had been compromised.


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To summarize — we’ve got a Captain Marvel origin story taking place in the early 90’s that Mr. Feige promises will pull from the Kree-Skrull War and, with the Skrulls potentially on Earth, we’ve got possible nods to a Secret Invasion tie-in.

With so much going on in these stories, we thought it’d be a good idea to quickly summarize them and then see if we could piece together what will happen in the Captain Marvel film, which is rumored to start filming early next year for it’s 2019 release.

First of all — let’s address release date — March 8, 2019. This will come after Avengers: Infinity War and Ant-Man and the Wasp, but right before the fourth, as-of-yet-untitled Avengers film. Guesses for that fourth film had been more along the lines of an Infinity War follow-up, and perhaps it still will be exactly that, but with Skrulls now on the table and Captain Marvel coming right before that film, which hits a couple months later in May of 2019, it seems possible we could get a title like, Avengers: Secret Invasion.

Here’s our thinking — the seeds for a “secret invasion” from a race of intelligent and motivated shapeshifting aliens are planted in the Captain Marvel film, which takes place in the early 1990’s. This gives the Skrull race 25 to 30 years to infiltrate our planet, put their people in place, learn our ways, our government, the nuances of life on Earth, all before taking it over.

BAM!

Avengers: Secret Invasion.

We should say this is NOT necessarily where we think Marvel Studios is taking their story — it’s likely to still be a story centered on Thanos, but certainly Phase Four could deal with this.

In fact, the last two remaining Avengers films will absolutely set the stage for Phase Four and a Secret Invasion of alien paranoia on Earth would be a pretty epic way to start that.

With that stage set, we’ll quickly dive into Captain Marvel’s origin story and the Kree-Skrull War.

Mar-Vell is a decorated soldier with the Kree military. He’s placed in a fleet, under the command of Yon-Rogg, and sent to earth to ascertain the defensive/offensive capabilities of our planet. The Kree race has been visiting earth for millennia as a possible staging area for their ongoing wars with other intelligent races. In fact, it’s the Kree that created the Inhuman race in our pre-history as a way to create super soldiers to fight for them in their wars. They’ve also placed impossible-to-defeat robots on our planet, called Sentries, in order to decimate the planet in an instant if it ever becomes a threat.

Yon-Rogg sends Mar-Vell to Earth to infiltrate Cape Canaveral by himself (due to a love triangle — that’s a whole other story). Mar-Vell, after an unfortunate mishap, takes on the identity of Dr. Walter Lawson, and works under cover there, observing humanity and growing increasingly sympathetic for humanity. All the while, Yon-Rogg continues to send threats to Earth, causing Mar-Vell to take on the identity of Captain Marvel, a new earth hero. It’s at this airbase that Mar-Vell, as Lawson, meets Carol Danvers as they are both stationed there.

Yes, we haven’t really touched on Carol Danvers yet, we know — but it’s important to set up this aspect of her origin as it’s intrinsically linked to Mar-Vell. He is eventually forced to reveal himself to Carol Danvers as Captain Marvel, the Kree alien known as Mar-Vell, who was sent to spy on Earth for the Kree Empire, but he also assures her that he does not want to invade her planet or destroy it and is now working on behalf of Earth to convince the Kree that they should not invade Earth or destroy it or anything else.

Soon after, Yon-Rogg unleashes a machine called the Psyche-Magnitron which ends up exploding. In the explosion, Mar-Vell’s alien DNA fuses with that of Carol Danvers, endowing her with the fantastic powers of Captain Marvel.

 
Okay. So that’s part of the origin story. However, there’s a bit more to consider here. At a certain point in Captain Mar-Vell’s story, he was given the gift of the Nega-Bands which further gave him powers. In interviews earlier this year, writer Nicole Perlman has hinted that Captain Marvel, the film, will dabble with the Quantum Realm in some capacity. They’ve also said cautioned that a concern of their story is it’s closeness to the Green Lantern story, which sees an alien, Abin-Sur, crashing to Earth and dying, where his ring immediately finds Hal Jordan and deems him worthy of joining what is essentially a corp of space cops.

Okay, so now to the Kree-Skrull War.

It started in Avengers #89 in 1971, and ran to Avengers #97. This event was in no way the big super arc sorts of stories we tell now these days. It was not a big comic event, but more of a meandering narrative that was loosely connected between the issues. The basic premise of it, however is that the Skrulls have invaded the American Government at a very high level and they are now trying to take down the Avengers with some gummed-up bureaucracy. The Supreme Intelligence of the Kree Empire, essentially a living AI that controls every aspect of Kree governance and military maneuvers, is also influencing events on Earth.

That is, Earth has a very quiet, under-the-radar, cosmic Cold War unfolding on it.

It turns out that Ronan the Accuser — whom we’ve already met in the first Guardians of the Galaxy, as played by Lee Pace — staged a military coup and took over Kree government from the Supreme Intelligence. Since that point, it has been attempting to free itself by giving long-distance telepathic commands to some of the heroes on Earth, including Captain Mar-Vell.

There’s a lot more to the story — Ronan the Accuser comes to Earth, reawakens the recently defeated Sentry, fights the Avengers here to reclaim Mar-Vell for himself, all the while there’s another fight on the Kree Homeworld of Hala to set the Supreme Intelligence free. This eventually happens, the Skrulls in the American government are revealed, and the war, at least on Earth, comes to an end.

Okay. Here we go.

Going from that origin story we mentioned earlier, with all of this in place, here is our guess about how the Captain Marvel film will start to unfold.

Mar-Vell and Yon-Rogg come to earth to ascertain its capacity for staging military invasions, using it as a sort of port or depot or, even worse, as a crop of potential genetic material to turn humans into mindless soldiers. Either that, or in their ongoing war with the Skrull Empire, they discover that the Skrulls have been invading earth, infiltrating it at all levels of government, and Mar-Vell and Yon-Rogg come to root out this problem.

In the process of their own infiltration of our government and military, Mar-Vell meets Carol Danvers and she quickly becomes an unwitting ally in their fight to uncover the Skrull invasion. However, in the process of this mission, Mar-Vell is killed and, as he dies, he passes on his “Nega-Bands” or possibly his “Quantum Bands” to Carol Danvers.

Quick background!

Remember we mentioned the Nega-bands earlier, well there are another pair of weaponized bracelets in Marvel Lore called the Quantum Bands, discovered by SHIELD Agent Wendell Vaughn, who is deemed worthy to wear them and he becomes the cosmic hero, Quasar, Protector of the Universe.

Carol Danvers, with the help of Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson was confirmed to be in the movie at SDCC) and some other Avengers, possibly even Peggy Carter (Haley Atwell) and Hank Pym (Michael Douglas), who would have been around at this time as well, start to unravel the plot. Yon-Rogg’s mission is to root out the Skrulls and kill them, but as shapeshifters, they could literally be anyone or anywhere — so “eff” it — we’ll just destroy the whole planet, throw the baby out with the bath water. The Kree certainly don’t care about this backwater planet. He activates the Kree Sentry — a robot typically portrayed as a planet-annihilators, sort of like a walking, talking mini-Deathstar.
  

And then, from here, Carol Danvers, the new Captain Marvel, takes off into space to continue fighting both Krees and Skrulls to keep them from invading our planet. Or, perhaps, she continues to fight alongside the Kree to keep the Skrulls from invading our planet again, all the while unaware that there are Skrulls still on earth.

Well, maybe they’re still on Earth. We just happen to think setting it in the 90’s makes it such a great opportunity for a long scale, slow-burn invasion set in the present day.

No matter what, when she hears that the biggest A-hole in the universe, Thanos, is invading, she rockets back to Earth to defend it, showing up right at the end of Avengers: Infinity War to balance the scales. 

BOOM!

After all, Captain Marvel and Thanos have always been the biggest of enemies, with Marvel being one of the only heroes capable of really taking the Mad Titan down. 

But all of this is just a theory based on three days of thinking. Check in with us in a month and we’ll see how much our theories have changed. After all, we’re not writing this movie! 

(But seriously, Marvel, we know you’re reading this and if we’re close, you should totes hire us to do a pass on the script…)

ALL that, and we haven’t even dug into the early 90’s sequel to the Kree-Skrull War, Operation: Galactic Storm!

Matt Key
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