Film / Captain Marvel (2019)

Discover what makes a hero.

"Tell the Supreme Intelligence that I'm coming to end it. The war, the lies, all of it."

— Carol Danvers / Captain Marvel

Captain Marvel is a 2019 superhero film, the twenty-first film entry of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and the ninth installment of Phase 3, based on the Marvel Comics character of the same name. It is directed by Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck (It's Kind of a Funny Story) and co-written by them and Geneva Robertson-Dworet (Tomb Raider). ^note With additional story credits from Nicole Perlman (Guardians of the Galaxy), Jac Schaeffer (Black Widow (2021)), Joe Schrapnel, Anna Waterhouse, Meg LeFauve (Inside Out), and Liz Flahive & Carly Mensch (GLOW), who were all involved with the project at various points in its development.

Set in 1995, the film centers on Vers (Brie Larson), who is introduced as a member of Starforce, an elite special-ops squad within the forces of the Kree, the militaristic alien race previously seen in Guardians of the Galaxy (2014) and Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. In the course of a war between the Kree and the Skrulls, a race of shapeshifting aliens, she finds herself on Earth, and discovers that the Skrull leader Talos (Ben Mendelsohn) has set his sights on Earth for unknown reasons. But Talos isn't the only one who develops an interest in our planet, as Vers also finds out about her past as a human on Earth, when she was a pilot named Carol Danvers.

Also appearing in the film are Jude Law as Yon-Rogg, Carol's mentor and the commander of Starforce, Lashana Lynch as her human friend Maria Rambeau (mother of Monica Rambeau, portrayed by Akira Akbar), Gemma Chan as Minn-Erva, Algenis Perez Soto as Att-Lass, Rune Temte as Bron-Char, and Mckenna Grace as young Carol, as well as Annette Bening as a woman from Carol's memories. Returning actors include Samuel L. Jackson as Nick Fury and Clark Gregg as Agent Phil Coulson (reprising his role in the movies for the first time since The Avengers), while Lee Pace and Djimon Hounsou reprise their respective roles as Ronan the Accuser and Korath from Guardians of the Galaxy (2014).

Not to be confused with the former Captain Marvel of DC Comics, who also got his own film in 2019, less than a month after Carol. It's a long story about trademarks.

A sequel was confirmed to be in development at 2019's San Diego Comic Con. In August 2020, Nia DaCosta (Candyman, Little Woods) was announced as the director, replacing Boden and Fleck. The film, titled simply The Marvels, was released on November 10, 2023, and co-stars Iman Vellani as Kamala Khan / Ms. Marvel and Teyonah Parris as a grown-up Monica Rambeau, who both previously made their MCU debuts in Ms. Marvel and WandaVision respectively. The Phase Five limited series Secret Invasion is also a spiritual spin-off of this film, featuring Fury and Talos in prominent roles (as well as Emilia Clarke as the grown-up G'iah, Talos' daughter) and continuing the Skrull narrative within the MCU.

---

Captain Marvel provides examples of:

Tropes # to E

• The '70s: The flashbacks to Carol's childhood are set in the 1970s with "Crazy On You" playing and with long sideburns on her father.
• The '80s: Scenes of Carol's training are set in the 1980s complete with a scene in the bar where she sings "Kiss Me Deadly" with Maria Rambeau at a bar with the high waisted jeans of that era.
• The '90s: Carol (in her Kree suit) crash-lands in a Blockbuster video rental store. Blockbuster had carved out quite a pop culture niche during the 1990s, but has been out-competed since then. She is immediately directed to a Radio Shack for communications equipment, which has since suffered a similar fate. Other indicators of the 1990s are the bands referred to, like with the Nine Inch Nails shirt that Carol wears. We also see hallmarks of the '90s like cyber-cafes (before the much more widespread use of laptops and smartphones), paper maps, pagers, and more. Also the shout-outs to The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air and Mallrats and the soundtrack consisting of Salt-N-Pepa's "Whatta Man", Nirvana's "Come as You Are", No Doubt's "Just a Girl" and Hole's "Celebrity Skin".
• Accent Upon The Wrong Syllable: Invoked when Carol tries to correct Fury, who keeps saying "Marvel" rather than "Mar-Vell." Fury's response is that he just thinks "Marvel" sounds better.
• Ace Custom: All the Kree uniforms have mohawk-like ridges on the helmets. Carol's is unique, however, in that it's formed from her actual hair instead of being part of the suit (this is a reference to an armor design from the comics).
• Ace Pilot: Carol and her friend Maria Rambeau are both brilliant military fighter pilots in the 1980s US Air Force. Though they are not technically aces because Air Force regulations of the time prohibited women from flying combat missions, which meant they had no aerial victories to their names and no opportunity to acquire any. At least until Maria shoots down Minn-Erva's dropship.
• Action Heroine: Carol's a former Air Force pilot and a qualified Kree warrior, and has the skills and powers necessary to take out several enemy combatants at once on her own. And that's before the removal of her Power Nullifier.
• Actor Allusion:
  • The car interior shot of Coulson and Fury as they follow Vers is framed similarly to scenes where Vincent and Jules go on a drive, with Samuel L. Jackson in the driver's seat in both films (and a smiling passenger beside him).
  • Another Pulp Fiction allusion: at one point, Talos greets the heroes (among them Nick Fury) by deliberately taking a long sip from one of their sodas.
• Actually Pretty Funny:
  • During their unsteady truce, Monica and Fury ask Talos if he can change into a cat, a file cabinet or a Venus flytrap. Fury with amusement says he'll give Talos fifty dollars to become a Venus flytrap. Talos despite himself looks amused.
  • At the end of the movie, Talos jokes that he could pose as Director Keller again since he enjoyed it. Fury laughs through his protests for Talos not to impersonate his boss.
• Adaptational Heroism: While they were a peaceful mercantile race at first, the Skrulls in the comics are themselves ruthless conquerors, and the conflict between them and the Kree is a case of Evil Versus Evil. In the movie, the Skrulls aren't nearly as bad as they are said to be and are being systematically sought out and slaughtered by the Kree for no other reason than they won't submit to Kree rule. That said, Talos and his men tried to kill Fury a number of times and generally seem uninterested about civilian deaths during their battles, so they maintain some of the edgier elements of their comic counterparts. Talos even acknowledges this when Carol apologizes for killing several of his men, saying that his own hands are also stained with innocent blood.
• Adaptational Job Change:
  • Maria Rambeau, a seamstress in the comics, is an Air Force pilot.
  • Minn-Erva is a Kree sniper as opposed to a scientist.
• Adaptational Nice Guy: Yon-Rogg, relatively speaking. In the comics, he was a jealous, backstabbing officer who tried to sabotage Mar-Vell's mission for personal gain, and he even became a traitor against the Kree eventually. In the film, he's still a villain Carol has personal reasons to dislike, but apparently a sincere Kree nationalist who really does want what is best for his people, as opposed to a Straw Hypocrite. He also shows some affection for Carol, though it's hard to tell how genuine it is sometimes (he spars with her when she wakes him up because she was having nightmares, prevents Ronan from attacking Earth while Carol's there, seems genuinely concerned when he arrives on Earth to find a Skrull disguised as her, and tells Carol he's proud of her at the end). According to Jonathan Schwartz, their relationship is "tender." According to the actor playing Yon-Rogg (Jude Law), he is attracted to Carol's humanity and finds her irresistible.
• Adaptational Protagonist: Captain Marvel is loosly based on Avengers: The Kree/Skrull War. The movie lets out all the other Avengers and while the storyline in the comics involves Captain Marvel, it is the Mar-Vell incarnation of the character while the movie is about Carol Danvers.
• Adaptational Villainy: In the comics that inspired the film's story, the dynamics of the alien empires were a little different than in the film. There, the Skrulls were a wealthy free-trading Evil Colonialist monarchy of shrewd shapeshifters (a little like an exaggerated bad guy version of the British Empire in space, though in their very ancient history the Skrulls had once been a benevolent society), and the Kree a former dependency of theirs which had revolted and since turned into a paranoid and militaristic garrison state that fanatically hated its old masters. In the movie, the Kree are simply space Nazis without the elements of sympathetic backstory from the comics, persecuting the innocent and defenseless Skrulls for no reason except bigotry, imperialism, and a refusal to submit to Kree rule.
• Adaptation Distillation: The movie's plot mixes together several plot elements from comic book stories, including Carol's origin story, forgetting her life as a human, the Skrulls invading Earth, and the Kree "warrior heroes" from Operation: Galactic Storm. The specific comics are Carol's origin story, the "The Enemy Within" story arc, and The Kree/Skrull War (Skrull vs. Kree with Earth caught in the middle).
• Adaptation Dye-Job: Mar-Vell, the original Captain Marvel in the comics, was a fairly young officer with either straw blond or very light platinum blond hair, depending on the time period. In the movie, the female Mar-Vell character is older and has gray hair. However, this is only when the Supreme Intelligence assumes her form, and she is blond when seen alive and in person.
• Adaptation Name Change:
  • Chewie is renamed Goose.
  • Carol's callsign is changed from "Cheeseburger" to "Avenger".
• Adaptation Personality Change:
  • In the original comics, Captain Mar-Vell was a heroic and noble but nationalistic Kree soldier who reluctantly accepted the necessity of war and hated the evil Skrulls with a cold fury. In the movie, the female Kree character Mar-Vell who replaces him hides oppressed Skrull refugees in her spacecraft and tries to save them from the fascist Kree regime, although she implies that she willingly worked as a soldier for the Kree until she decided that they were wrong.
  • Likewise, in the source material the Kree character Minn-Erva was originally a scientist who was anti-war in a Pragmatic Evil way and actually against the new Kree-Skrull war that was brewing when she was introduced, thinking the Kree would be better off developing and improving their own civilization than warring with others. Here, she is military and not obviously pacifistically inclined in any way.
  • Carol Danvers herself is noticeably more assertive and aggressive than she used to be in the comics, at least around the time of her origin and early career (which would correspond roughly to the period the movie covers). Though to be fair, there is a lot of Retcon and Depending on the Writer here, too, and the movie's characterization draws mostly from the more recent comics.
• Adaptation Relationship Overhaul: Carol's best friend is a fellow Air Force pilot named Maria Rambeau. In the comics, the two have little to no history with one another, and it's actually Maria's daughter Monica who is Carol's ally. Played with, as Monica does step into her comics role in MCU continuity in the sequel, The Marvels.
• Adapted Out:
  • All of Carol's Ms. Marvel backstory is absent, as well as a rework of how she got her powers with the only thing kept was that she gained them via an explosion.
  • Michael Rossi's role in the comics as Carol's fellow officer and close friend in her Air Force days is largely given to Maria Rambeau instead.
  • The original Captain Marvel's girlfriend Una, a Kree military physician who helped Mar-Vell against Yon-Rogg's intrigues, and was also the Betty to Carol Danvers' Veronica in a Love Triangle with him as the Archie. While the film has a character named Mar-Vell, she is very different from the original hero, as is her relationship with Carol, and Una makes no appearance here.
  • Maria's husband Frank. In the comics she was married to retired fireman Frank Rambeau and raising their daughter together with him as a happy family. In the film, she is a working single mother who raises her daughter without a man; in fact, the name of Monica's father is not even mentioned.
• Adorable Abomination: Talos treats Goose the kitty as a terrifying monster, something that the human characters, particularly Fury, find funny. She demonstrates that she's more than just a cat by extruding tentacles from her mouth and swallowing the Tesseract without issue and later grabbing and devouring a bunch of Kree soldiers.
• Advertised Extra: Despite the fanfare surrounding the return of Agent Coulson, Ronan the Accuser and Korath the Pursuer, they don't have much screen time. It's particularly apparent with Ronan; he only appears in two scenes, in which he doesn't do much of anything except say a couple of lines.
• Aerial Canyon Chase: Minn-Erva pursues Maria Rambeau through a canyon in a high-speed chase. Maria wins when she maneuvers around Minn-Erva and shoots her out of the sky.
• Affably Evil: Talos is an extremely affable foe. Probably because he's not actually evil, just on the opposite side from Carol and Fury in the beginning.
• Affectionate Nickname:
  • Dr. Lawson calls Carol "Ace".
  • Carol calls Monica "Lieutenant Trouble".
• Age Lift: In the comics, Monica Rambeau is the same age as Carol and an established superhero. Here, she's Maria's eleven-year-old daughter. Given that this is something of a Prequel, however, it puts her at a proper age for later movies to be set in the present.
• Alien Arts Are Appreciated:
  • Talos takes a liking to a S.H.I.E.L.D. blazer, even wearing it in his natural appearance.
  • Implied with Dr. Lawson, who apparently liked Top Gun enough to name her Flerken after one of the characters.
  • Aboard Mar-Vell's lab, there are various pop culture memorabilia, from a "The Fonz" lunchbox to a Space Invaders pinball game, that the Skrull refugees have as entertainment. They're also dressed in human clothing.
  • The Supreme Intelligence admires and even dances briefly to the Nirvana song "Come As You Are" in Carol's subconscious.
• Alien Autopsy: The body of a Skrull, who had earlier transformed himself into Coulson and died in a crash in Fury's car, gets examined by S.H.I.E.L.D. According to the coroner, the Skrull's body is not composed of carbon.
• Alien Blood: Carol's blue-green blood, which she got from a Superhuman Transfusion from the alien Kree.
  • The Kree have blue blood.
  • The Skrulls bleed purple.
• Alien Invasion: As the Supreme Intelligence reminds Vers during their morning meeting, the Kree have been at war with the Skrulls, vicious terrorists with shapeshifting abilities who invade and take over planets by destabilizing their leadership.
• Aliens of London: Talos maintains Ben Mendelsohn's natural Australian accent whenever taking his natural form or indicating to the characters that it's him in a disguise, though adapts an American accent while impersonating Fury's boss. A number of accents appear amongst the Kree ranging from American to British to Korath maintaining Djimon Hounsou's distinctive Beninese accent. This could be explained by Starforce members possessing Universal Translators, and Carol, being from Earth, could be hearing Earth dialects.
• Alien Non-Interference Clause: Completely averted with the Kree. Carol directly explains the situation to Fury, and is not dissuaded in the slightest when she realizes Earth has no contact with the galaxy at large. And then there's being open to carpet bombing the entire planet as a last resort.
• Aliens Speaking English: The alien and human characters can understand each other fine, explained by the Skrulls and Kree all having Translator Microbes on them.
• Always Chaotic Evil: Kree propaganda refers to the Skrulls as a race of vicious terrorists. In fact, Ronan states that one Skrull anywhere is a threat to Kree everywhere because they won't know if the person they're talking to is an evil imposter. This is subverted. The Skrulls portrayed in the movie are working to end the war, and have lives and families outside it. In fact, the Kree fall into this, as they are once again shown to be an unsympathetic, tyrannical force hunting the innocent Skrulls.
• Amazing Technicolor Population: Skrulls naturally have light-green, striped skin. Kree usually have blue skin, though there's a subset with Caucasian human-like skin tones, which allows the Kree to convince Carol that she is a Kree as well.
• Amnesiac Hero: Carol talks about how she can't remember anything before meeting the Kree, but she finds evidence of a life she lived on Earth before then. She has flashes of memories, but she doesn't know if they're real.
• Anachronic Order:
  • There's an occurrence of this trope in-universe, when the Skrulls prod through Carol's memories, trying to find a lead on the FTL engine technology. Talos can be heard complaining about how the events they're seeing are out of order and confusing, and at a few points, they reverse too far through the "footage" and see Carol's memories as a child.
  • The mid-credits scene takes place after a Time Skip of 24 years, to following the events of Avengers: Infinity War, only for the final post-credits scene to jump back to a period after the end of the film proper, but before at least the events of the post-credits scene of Thor.
  • For the Marvel Cinematic Universe as a whole — this is the 21st film of the MCU, but takes place before all of them except for the fifth film, Captain America: The First Avenger.
• Anachronistic Soundtrack: Whilst most of the songs heard in the film fit the film's 1995 setting (older songs like Nirvana's "Come As You Are" and Heart's "Crazy On You" notwithstanding), Hole's "Celebrity Skin" (heard over the credits) came out in 1998.
• And Starring: With Annette Bening, with Clark Gregg, and Jude Law^note this is the first Marvel film where Samuel L. Jackson doesn't receive the "and" billing, being billed second after Brie Larson, instead.
• Animalistic Abomination: Goose appears to be nothing more than an ordinary cat, but is referred to as a Flerken — which initially seems to be a case of Call a Rabbit a "Smeerp"... until she extrudes tentacles from her mouth and eats the Tesseract. She also has a Black-Hole Belly, devouring several Kree soldiers at once without leaving a single trace behind.
• Apathetic Citizens: Averted. During the train fight between Carol and a Skrull disguised as an old lady, the citizens on the train try to stop her from hurting the Skrull, thinking he is an elderly woman who Carol punched for no reason — even thought the "old lady" showed strength and martial arts skills quite unusual for someone "her" age.
• Arbitrary Skepticism: Averted when Lawson reveals to Carol that her real name is Mar-Vell and she comes from an alien planet named Hala. Carol responds by saying that would sound completely insane, but they were just shot down by a spaceship and Lawson's blood is blue, so she can buy it.
• Arc Words: "What's given can be taken away." Finally given an Armor-Piercing Response with "You didn't give them to me."
• Artificial Gravity: When the Quadjet enters orbit, we get a few seconds of floating before Carol switches the gravity on. The alien ships have it on all the time.
• Artistic License – Biology: According to the S.H.I.E.L.D. scientist, Skrull biology is based on something "not on the periodic table" instead of carbon. Which brings up a great number of questions about how this works. For example, an element so crucial to their biochemistry would need to be abundant in their diet or through another form of intake, and by extension it needs to be easily available in any environment they inhabit for a long time, which in turn would mean it could not possibly be so exotic as claimed.
• Artistic License – Chemistry: As noted above, the idea of an alien species based on an element not found on "our" periodic table being a way of saying "he's not from around here" has a host of problems and inaccuracies. For starters, the periodic table is not unique to Earth.
• Artistic License – Engineering:
  • Barring the Kree Accuser Warships, none of the aircraft in the movie appear to have missiles or any other beyond visual range weapons of any kind yet still have a target lock system. Especially glaring seeing as two of these vehicles are Air Force prototypes which probably would have never left the drawing board in real life for this reason. While it's possible that the missiles simply weren't loaded (prototype aircraft generally don't carry live weapons unless on a flight specifically to test the weapons), the fact that Dr. Lawson's Pegagus prototype did have live ammo loaded for the cannons argues against that explanation.
  • Despite the Kree Accuser Warships having beyond visual range weapons, they don't seem to be armed with anything else. No cannons for engaging similarly sized ships let alone point defense for enemy fighters or an 11th-Hour Superpower-boosted Carol Danvers.
  • The Quadjet doesn't even have any auto-cannons either. Instead its armament consists of wing-mounted machine guns, something that hasn't been on any American aircraft since WWII. ^note  The machine guns themselves are also from World War II but that is Truth in Television as the M1919 Browning did see service up until the '90s in US service.
• Artistic License – Military: Women weren't able to serve as fighter pilots until 1993, so Carol and Maria wouldn't be able to fly around in fighter jets in 1989. They would be flying in tankers. The film Hand Waves this by saying they never actually flew in combat, and that testing Dr.Lawson/Mar-Vell's prototype is the only reason they even had a chance of flying at all. Women were allowed to be test pilots, but it's unlikely that test pilots would have their own F-15 Eagles assigned to them.
  • In her flashback to trying to complete a rope obstacle at the Air Force Academy, Carol fails and falls to the ground. Her fellow cadets are heard in the background jeering at her and telling her she can't make it. Completely wrong. Cadets and military personnel involved in training are fully expected to support each other and help each other make it through. Any competent training instructor who heard her fellow cadets doing this would rain Hell down on them. Recall An Officer and a Gentleman; one of the things that got Mayo on Sergeant Foley's shit-list during the training was not supporting and encouraging his fellow officer trainees.
• Ascended Extra:
  • In previous MCU films, Nick Fury's role tends to be limited to a distant supporting role. Here, he's front and center in all the action and story alongside Carol. This is showcased more in the credits where Samuel L. Jackson is the second one to be listed among the cast as opposed to him just appearing during the "Also Starring" segment.
  • The badass black female fighter pilot Maria Rambeau, who is Carol's best friend and a strong working single mother. She was not quite created for the movie, in that a black woman with this name exists in the comics. But there she is only a Muggle extra as the completely unremarkable mother of superhero Monica Rambeau—neither an important friend to Carol nor an elite military Ace Pilot like in the movie. The much more significant role Maria plays here is more like that of Colonel Michael Rossi, who was Major Carol Danvers' friend and military mentor in the comics.
• As Himself: Stan Lee on the train, rehearsing his lines for his cameo in Mallrats. This is the first and only time in the MCU that he has definitively appeared as himself^note He was credited as such in Thor: The Dark World as well, but there's no clue to this in the film itself, and the second time in a Marvel property movie, the first time being in Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer.
• Ass Shove: Played for Laughs. Maria Rambeau reacts to being called a young lady by Talos by offering to "shove [her] foot somewhere it doesn't belong."
  Talos: ...Am I just supposed to guess where that is?
  Maria, Fury, and Carol: Your ass!
• As You Know:
  • Yon-Rogg all but says the name of the trope as he reminds Vers how the Supreme Intelligence works.
  • During Vers's meeting with the Supreme Intelligence, she's reminded (and shown) that the Skrulls are shapeshifters who invade and take over planets, something Vers has heard many times but is done for the audience's sake.
• Autobots, Rock Out!: Once Carol gets her full powers unleashed, she beats up her old squad as No Doubt's "Just a Girl" plays in the background.
• Badass Adorable: What ferocious creature is capable of giving Nick Fury his iconic scars? It’s Goose, the Flerken who looks exactly like an adorable housecat.
• Badass Boast:
  • In the trailers, Carol gives an ominous warning; "I'm not gonna fight your war... I'm gonna end it."
  • Near the end, Carol blasts Yon-Rogg mid-speech rather than humor him with a hand-to-hand fight.
    Carol: I have nothing to prove to you.
• Badass Bystander: Played for Laughs when a bunch of random citizens on the train dogpile Carol and restrain her to keep this random crazy woman from beating the shit out of a helpless old lady, not realizing said old lady is actually a disguised Skrull.
• Badass Creed: This film establishes the Kree Empire has one: "For the good of all Kree!"
• Bait-and-Switch:
  • The opening of the film shows dust blowing and falling in slow motion, very similar to people disintegrating due to the Snap, so that it's possible to think this is an immediate sequel to Infinity War. Then it becomes clear that it's Vers's dream sequence.
  • Since Fury maintains in The Winter Soldier that he lost an eye to "someone he trusted", you'd think this happened when a Skrull disguised itself as Coulson and attacked him in a car. Fury does get wounded here... just above his left eye, but the eye itself isn't damaged. He still loses his eye, though — to the cat-like alien he adored.
  • At one point, Fury attempts to have Goose attack two Kree soldiers, but suddenly she appears to change sides when she affectionately approaches one of the Kree. It turns out said Kree is actually a disguised Talos.
  • Carol is suspicious of Maria's neighbor and outright accuses and calls him Talos, much to the neighbor's confusion. Maria solves the situation and sends him away after telling him she's busy and she'll visit him tomorrow before promptly closing the door. Cue Talos appearing behind them on the other side of the living room.
• Barefoot Captives: When Carol wakes up restrained on the Skrull ship, she sees that her boots have been removed, and she's now barefoot. She breaks free and fights her way past the Skrulls in her bare feet, eventually managing to find and recover her boots, just before getting off the ship.
• Batman Can Breathe in Space: Carol at full power no longer needs her suit's oxygen mask to survive in space. By the end of the film, she doesn't even need to wear her helmet.
• Battle Cry: Once the locals on Torfa are discovered to be disguised Skrulls, they all transform back and howl in unison, preparing to fight Starforce.
• Battle in the Center of the Mind: Carol vs. the Supreme Intelligence takes place in her sub-conscious because that is the only way anyone can interact with it. The battle is the Supreme Intelligence twisting the "world" around her and shoving dispiriting memories in her face. The result reminds Carol of her determination through life in the face of overwhelming odds and unlocks her binary mode.
• Big Bad: Talos is the leader of the Skrull terrorists and the one that Carol is fighting against to prevent him from attacking the Kree homeworld of Hala. It's subverted with The Reveal that the Skrulls are actually just refugees looking for a new home, with Talos becoming the Tritagonist to Fury and Carol. The real Big Bad is Yon-Rogg, who kidnapped and gaslighted Carol into becoming a weapon for the Kree, with the Supreme Intelligence serving as the Greater-Scope Villain.
• Big Eater: Played for laughs with Goose, who sprouts enormous tentacles from her mouth to eat things much bigger than her. A brief Mook Horror Show plays out as she grabs and devours several Kree at once, and she's able to swallow the Tesseract without trouble.
• Black-and-Gray Morality: While it's stated the Skrulls have done a number of morally questionable things, with Talos admitting his hands are far from clean, they are ultimately refugees trying to survive against the imperialistic and genocidal Kree.
• Black Box: Once again, the Tesseract continues to baffle all who study it. Dr. Lawson had better luck researching it and applying her knowledge thanks to being a scientist from a Higher-Tech Species, though we never find out if she was ultimately successful because the Kree murder her before she could test her Light Speed Engine.
• Black Site: Carol and Fury visit one early on in the movie to investigate Carol's past, with access granted thanks to the latter's S.H.I.E.L.D. security clearance.
• Blatant Lies: The official story is that Nick Fury lost his eye to Kree torture, certainly not due to a cat scratch after the mission was over.
• Blown Across the Room: Along with the thermal damage it can do, Carol's photon blasts blow away their target as well. Once she breaks the inhibitor implant, they are so forceful that the law of action and reaction make her blow herself across the room in recoil. As her newfound freedom from the inhibitor progresses, she figures out flight, using the blast as thrust.
• Bluff the Impostor: Suspecting his boss has been replaced by a Skrull, Fury suggests a course of action similar to an old campaign they ran together; when Talos doesn't recognise that the campaign never happened, Fury's fears are confirmed. It's actually inverted later on when a disguised Talos mentions that same (nonexistent) campaign to Fury, thus outing himself as an ally to Fury, but not the other Kree whose ranks he's infiltrated.
• Bookends: Carol gets a few.
  • Her first and last fight with Yon-Rogg ends with her blasting him away with her powers. The first time, it's because he bested her in hand-to-hand combat, and she reflexively escalated to photon-blasting him even after being chided that she'd be reprimanded with a lecture from the Supreme Intelligence over it. The last time is when she is unleashed from the Kree, and utterly apathetic to proving herself to Yon-Rogg anymore, essentially casually swatting him aside as inconsequential.
  • She arrives on Earth by falling out of a Skrull ship and crashing into a Blockbuster. In the final fight, she falls off a Kree warship and falls to Earth, only this time she's fully awakened her powers and learns to fly.
• Bound and Gagged: During the discussion about where the Skrull refugees should go, Fury remarks to the others that Talos left the director of S.H.I.E.L.D. tied up somewhere so he could impersonate him.
• Brick Joke:
  • Carol's sarcastic response to Yon-Rogg's request for a mission report ("I'm fine, thanks for asking.") is returned by Yon-Rogg later in the movie when he confronts Carol's Skrull impersonator in Maria's shack.
  • Fury's use of "Havana" to sniff out Talos in the bunker and later Talos using "Havana" to send a hint to Fury of his disguise as a Kree on the ship. (See under Bluff the Imposter above.)
• Buffy Speak: Talos asks Fury about the whereabouts of the "thing", referring to the Tesseract. He knows what it's called, since Carol named it earlier.
• The Bus Came Back:
  • The movie takes advantage of its as a prequel to bring back Korath the Pursuer and Ronan the Accuser, who were both killed in Guardians of the Galaxy.
  • Clark Gregg returns to films, having spent most of the previous few years playing Coulson on Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D..
• But Now I Must Go: The movie ends with Carol and the Skrull refugees setting out to space to help the scattered Skrull survivors. Carol also plans to wage a war with the Kree Empire and its Supreme Intelligence (and as of Guardians of the Galaxy, she's won, with Ronan an outcast among his people).
• Butt-Monkey:
  • In his limited screentime, not only is Coulson repeatedly being called "rookie" and "new guy", but he also gets accidentally left behind in the Blockbuster store, much to his bewilderment (though it's justified, as he's been replaced by a Skrull who leaves with Fury).
  • Nick Fury, of all people, also falls into this category. He crashes his car after being attacked by a Skrull who was disguised as Coulson, gets Overshadowed by Awesome when Carol nonchalantly blasts a door lock right he's about to use the security guard's fingerprint in his scotch tape, gets curb-stomped and framed by Talos, gets scanned by the Kree and his threat level deemed "low-to-none", and finally gets his left eye clawed by an alien cat.
• Call a Rabbit a "Smeerp":
  • The characters refer to the Skrulls impersonating someone else as "simming" (presumably short for "simulating") their target.
  • The Skrull characters react badly to Goose, referring to her in their language as a "Flerken", seemingly their word for "cat", as they don't know what "cat" means. Subverted when she turns out to really be an alien creature verging on an Eldritch Abomination, which just looks like a cat, and which can swallow the Tesseract and several Kree soldiers in one gulp.
• Call-Back:
  • One within the film, as Carol's Badass Boast from the trailers is really something she learned from Dr. Lawson.
    "This is not about fighting wars. It's about ending them."
  • When she and Carol first talk, Maria refers to a time Carol won a motorcycle race by taking a short-cut. In the Aerial Canyon Chase, Maria gets the upper hand on Minn-Erva by taking a short-cut and doubling back.
  • Maria also mentions that Carol used to wake her up by banging on the door at the break of day and instigating a race competition, which Carol won by cheating (in a manner Carol doesn't recognize as cheating). At the start of the film, she did the exact same thing to Yon-Rogg, albeit with combat instead of a race.
• Call-Forward:
  • As the movie is the second released after Avengers: Infinity War, it starts with images of crumbling dirt.
  • It won't be the last time Nick Fury crashes his car. From the same movie he mentions he lost an eye the last time he trusted someone, and we see that Goose was the someone in question. Also, S.H.I.E.L.D. is once again infiltrated by hostile outsiders, though HYDRA would probably turn green with envy if they saw how fast and easily the Skrulls climbed up S.H.I.E.L.D.'s chain of command.
  • A character gets wounded just as the jet's door is closing. Unlike Lash, however, Talos survives.
  • Project PEGASUS was the research into the Tesseract Dr. Selvig was heading way back in The Avengers. Now we get to see its origins.
  • During the autopsy of the Skrull, Fury dryly remarks that it looks like he isn't from around here. He uses the same words in The Avengers, when he briefs Steve Rogers, who doesn't know about the existence of aliens yet, about Loki and the Tesseract.
  • While impersonating Fury's boss, Talos states during the autopsy that they cannot trust anyone, not even their own men with the Skrull infiltration happening. He has no idea just how right he would be many years later, where it turns out most of S.H.I.E.L.D. was infested with HYDRA moles.
  • Carol is saved with Kree blood and had her memory wiped in the process. In Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., Fury revives Coulson the same way (in fact, that series established that Kree blood can revive humans).
  • Countless Kree writings are present in Lawson's effects, akin to the coordinates to the Kree labyrinth with the Diviner from Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. season two.
  • The basic layout of the Kree Accuser warships is the same as the Dark Aster, only in a single solid block and far more heavily armed.
  • The power limiter affixed to her neck that Carol has for most of the movie is quite similar to the one that Daisy/Quake gets for a good part of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. season 5. It's also similar in design to the obedience disks from Thor: Ragnarok.
  • There are some Troll dolls lying around in Mar-Vell's spaceship. Seems Yondu was not the only alien we met to love these dolls.
  • Fury uses a two-way pager to communicate with his S.H.I.E.L.D. superiors. This is later modified by Carol to be the one seen during the stinger of Avengers: Infinity War.
• Can't Kill You, Still Need You: When Vers frees herself aboard the Skrull ship, Talos prevents his men from just shooting her, as they need the information buried in her subconscious.
• Cats Are Mean: Lovable as Goose is towards the Main Characters, she does get tired of Fury's doting near the end of the film, scratching his eye and forcing him to adopt his iconic eyepatch. She also eats Kree soldiers with abandon. Though she's not actually a cat, she's a Flerken.
• Ceiling Smash: During the subway fight, Carol slams a Skrull into the ceiling of the train car.
• Celebrity Paradox:
  • Stan Lee's Creator Cameo is him reading over the screenplay of Mallrats, where he discusses the context behind his creations of some of his more famous characters such as Spider-Man and the Hulk. Michael Rooker, who plays Yondu in the Guardians of the Galaxy movies, also co-stars in that film.
  • On seeing Goose the cat muzzled, Fury remarks that she's not Hannibal Lecter. Hannibal was portrayed by Odin himself, Sir Anthony Hopkins.
  • The Blockbuster Video store Carol Danvers crashes into is a treasure trove for this trope:
    • Carol blasts a True Lies cardboard cutout. Bill Paxton, who would go on to play John Garrett in Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., is one of the stars.
    • Carol passes by the VHS of Hook. Young Wendy would look like Pepper Potts growing up, and the film had a Crosscast Role cameo by Glenn Close (Irani Rael) as Gutless.
    • There's also the VHS of First Knight. Ralph Ineson played Ralf in it, as well as a Ravager pilot in Guardians of the Galaxy (2014).
    • Carol picks up a VHS of The Right Stuff. Scott Glenn (Stick in Daredevil and The Defenders) and Jeff Goldblum (the Grandmaster in Thor: Ragnarok) are part of the cast.
    • Carol passes by the VHS of Last Action Hero, which had a cardboard cutout-only cameo of Sylvester Stallone (Stakar Ogord). Interestingly, his appearance there was part of an In-Universe Celebrity Paradox.
    • When Carol emerges from the video rental store, she passes a poster for Babe, which features the voice of Hugo Weaving (Red Skull) as sheepdog Rex, on the wall.
  • Ben Mendelsohn adds to the existing celebrity paradox of Star Wars in the MCU, as he was Director Krennic in Rogue One: A Star Wars Story.
• Chekhov's Gun: Ronan fires one... and misses. Early in the movie, he plans to carpet-bomb the planet Torfa as an extreme way to flush out the Skrulls there. He then plans to do it again to Earth to eliminate the Skrulls that fled there, but Captain Marvel thwarts his bombing run singlehandedly.
• Chore Character Exploration: Near the end of the movie, Carol and Nick Fury discuss their plans for the future while washing dishes together at Maria's house.
• Collapsible Helmet: Kree body armor can manifest a helmet at will, allowing the suit to serve as a life-support system underwater or in space. The titular heroine has one of these, just like her design in the comics.
• Combat Pragmatist: After Carol has unlocked her full powers and sent Ronan fleeing, Yon-Rogg challenges her to "put away the light show" and finally prove she can beat him in hand-to-hand combat, a call-back to a sparring scene early in the movie. She responds by hitting him right in the chest with an energy blast, then tells him, "I have nothing to prove to you."
• Comic-Book Movies Don't Use Codenames: In no instance is Carol ever called "Captain Marvel" — save for one potential reference when she and Nick play around with Kree names (particularly the late Mar-Vell).
• The Comically Serious: As Carol and the Kree go to investigate a Skrull infiltration of a border planet early in the movie, the entire coversation is this as all the Kree deconstruct her joke.
  Bron-Char: It's funny because objectively you're quite handsome.
  Korath: Thank you.
• Composite Character: Carol got her powers from an explosion of an alien device near Mar-Vell and Yon-Rogg, but the incident made her a conduit to an endless source of electromagnetic energy that granted superhuman strength and durability as well as energy blasts, like a temporary version of Monica Rambeau's powerset.
• Conditioned to Be Weak: On top of her Restraining Bolt and initial Amnesiac Hero status, "Vers" is constantly told by Yon-Rogg that she's too emotionally driven and that using her powers against him in sparring indicates she's too weak to beat him without them. After "Vers" remembers her prior life as Carol Danvers and discovers the depths of Kree's gaslighting, Yon-Rogg attempts to Honor Before Reason her in their final confrontation, challenging her to fight him without powers again to prove she can. This time, she promptly blasts him, saying, "I have nothing to prove to you."
• Continuity Nod:
  • The Tesseract appears as the power core that the Skrulls and Kree are after.
  • Fury refuses to touch the Tesseract with his bare hands. Given what happened to the Red Skull, he probably made the right call.
  • The transport that Fury and Carol ride is revealed to be called the "Quadjet", a precursor to the Quinjets used by the Avengers.
• Cool Plane: The Project Pegasus bird is very sleek and stealthy-looking, resembling artist conceptions of the (possibly mythical) Project Aurora recon plane.
• Cover Identity Anomaly: Talos outs himself through a pair of Brick Jokes by first calling Nick Fury "Nicholas" when getting on the elevator (as it had been established at that time no one ever used his first name for anything) and then later mentioning "Havana" as a previous op that they had worked on (Fury said he stuck to places that start with a 'B' because they rhyme well).
• Cover Innocent Eyes and Ears: As Talos prepares to kill two Kree guards, he asks his wife not to let their daughter see the violence. G'iah sneaks a peek anyway, and later she seems quite proud of what a badass her father is.
• Creator Cameo:
  • Stan Lee appears As Himself aboard the train, rehearsing his lines for Mallrats. Carol, looking for a disguised Skrull, looks at him, gives him a smile, and continues on her way.
  • Kelly Sue DeConnick appears as a bystander on the train station who walks past Carol while giving her a very confused look.
• Cross-Cast Role: While Goose is female in the MCU, she is portrayed by four male cats, since a vast majority of orange cats are males.
• Crucified Hero Shot: Carol, when she's falling to Earth from the Kree starship but then she activates her flight powers.
• Curb-Stomp Battle:
  • Talos catches up to Fury in the S.H.I.E.L.D. base's basement, and though Fury is able to disarm him, he's no match for Talos in hand-to-hand combat and is soon on the ground.
  • The space battle against Ronan's fleet. Just as Kevin Feige promised, Carol is indeed the most powerful hero of all of the MCU, and trashes the enemy with almost contemptuous ease, destroying them in a manner more akin to a force of nature and sending even an established badass villain like Ronan the Accuser scurrying away with his tail between his legs.
• Cuteness Proximity: The one thing that can shake the unflappable Nick Fury is Goose. His fawning over Goose is a Running Gag, eventually costing him an eye.
• Dare to Be Badass: Maria enumerates all the dangers and difficulties Carol will face near the climax of the film, explaining why she won't accompany her and will instead stay behind to look after her daughter. Little Monica Rambeau counters that yes, it will be incredibly dangerous, but also unspeakably badass, and that's exactly why her mom should go. When Maria is still hesitant, Monica fights dirty by asking her to think of the kind of example Maria is setting for her daughter by staying behind.
• Deadpan Snarker: Carol's personality is based more on her snarky and irreverent depiction from later comics than the Spirited Young Lady she was in her early adventures. Not even S.H.I.E.L.D. escapes her snark.
  Carol: Does announcing your identity on clothing help with the "covert" part of your job?
• Deadly Scratch: After Fury annoys Goose once too often with unwanted attention, she lashes out and scratches his eye. He seems to think it will heal in a little while, but the incident turns out to be the reason for his iconic eyepatch.
• Death by Origin Story: Similar to the comics, Carol gets her powers in an explosion involving Mar-Vell and the villainous Yon-Rogg. Unlike the comics, Mar-Vell doesn't survive the initial attack.
• Death from Above: The Accusers are called upon whenever orbital carpet-bombing is needed by the Kree Starforce, and unleash warheads on planets to eliminate any Skrull presence in the least subtle way... and they don't care about collateral damage (i.e., the devastation of the worlds the Skrulls hide in).
• Deceptively Cute Critter: Goose looks and acts like an adorable cat, so much so that Nick Fury is captivated by her. Talos the Skrull, however, knows more about her, calling her a "flerken". Flashback shows that Carol's old mentor, Wendy Lawson a.k.a Mar-Vell, was the original owner of Goose, and after her owner's death, she simply hangs around in the facility her owner used to work in, with no one the wiser due to her being an otherwise harmless cat. Her true nature is shown later when she can swallow the Tesseract with no problems, and she can also sprout tentacles out of her mouth and swallow multiple people/things at once into her Black-Hole Belly. The Kree soldiers classified her as having a high threat.
• Decoy Getaway: Norex, Talos's "science guy", stays behind on Earth to lure Yon-Rogg away, impersonating Carol so the party can reach Mar-Vell's lab unimpeded.
• Defector from Decadence: Mar-Vell is the only sympathetic Kree we encounter in the film, seeking the Tesseract to provide a means of the Skrulls escaping from her people who are intent on committing genocide on the rather helpless shapeshifters. Upon hearing the truth, Carol does the same.
• Defensive "What?": Twice with Fury regarding his pager. The first time, Carol silently demands the pager with a hand out, and he gives a "What?" She verbally demands it, saying he can't be trusted with it, and confiscates it. Later, Carol's about to hand him the modified pager with her contact on it but pulls it away as Fury reaches to take it. He gives another "What!?" while asking her if she thinks he's going to call her willy-nilly, after which she emphatically reminds him it's for emergencies only.
• Determinator: Carol just keeps going and going, and none of her enemies can bring her down, no matter what nasty tricks they use or how tired she gets. Even the Supreme Intelligence can't crack her, as she draws upon her own inner strength to overcome the depression It throws at her. Exemplified by a montage showing all the times in her life Carol, failed, fell, got knocked down, accompanied by statements about how she's only human, the Kree made her strong, and without them she's weak. Then Carol remembers what comes next... every time she fell, she got back up again.
• Diegetic Switch: The music playing when Carol rides to Pancho's Bar becomes the music playing within the bar.
• Digital De Aging: Clark Gregg and Samuel L. Jackson are nearly flawlessly de-aged to appear as they did in the 1990s. Notably, unlike previous examples like Ant-Man, it is done throughout the entire film rather than in just one or two scenes.
• Does Not Like Spam: Carol asks Fury to tell her something so bizarre that a Skrull wouldn't be able to make it up on the spot, and he answers that he refuses to eat toast that is cut diagonally.
• Don't Touch It, You Idiot!: Inverted. When The Tesseract pops up and Carol tells Fury to take it he flatly refuses. While he can't know for certain it would kill him, he's too savvy to pick up a glowing energy cube of unknown origin with his bare hands.
• The Dreaded:
  • Talos meets Goose's presence with revulsion, calling the cat a Flerken and advising the Main Characters to keep an eye on the creature. The Kree later scan the cat and identify her as a Flerken, which is classified as a highly dangerous creature. They're right to do so, seeing as the little cat is actually a miniature Eldritch Abomination capable of launching horrific tentacles from its mouth to engulf its prey in its black hole belly. She's also capable of eating an Infinity Stone, the Tesseract, completely unaffected.
  • Carol blows up a bunch of Kree warheads that were deployed to bomb Earth, annihilates Ronan's entire fighter screen, and destroys an Accuser battleship with ease by flying through it. Seeing this, Ronan decides to flee, and despite knowing Earth has no planetary defense system (other than Carol), the Kree have not tried to attack it since.
• Due to the Dead: Talos, whilst imitating the head of S.H.I.E.L.D., takes a moment to honor a fallen comrade who's been subjected to an Alien Autopsy, even though it risks his cover. It's an early hint that the Skrulls are not the problem here.
• Dying Smirk: Talos's "science guy" Norex stays back at Maria's property to distract Yon-Rogg so the others can fly to Mar-Vell's ship without interference. After his disguise is blown and he's fatally shot by Yon-Rogg, he smiles while taunting Yon-Rogg that he's too late. This infuriates Yon-Rogg (who's always trained his troops that anger is a weakness, and only gives victory to the enemy) so much that he turns back and shoots the dying Skrull again.
• 11th-Hour Superpower: Carol unlocks her binary state during her Heroic Second Wind as she resists the Supreme Intelligence, when she realizes her true friends are on Earth and the Kree are villains.
• Elites Are More Glamorous: Non-human example with the Starforce, the Kree elite unit Carol is part of. It also exists in the comics, but she is not a member there, nor were Mar-Vell and Yon-Rogg, who were instead officers in the regular Kree Navy.
• Emergency Transformation: We're told that the Kree found Carol after a near-fatal incident and injected her with Kree blood in order to save her life, and to make her more like them.
• Enemy Eats Your Lunch: When Talos infiltrates the Rambeau household, he helps himself to one of their soft drinks, slurping away on the straw when he announces his presence. Though, as plot developments moments later reveal, he's not the true enemy, and is actually an ally. Also doubles as an Actor Allusion to Samuel L. Jackson, alluding to a scene where his character in Pulp Fiction does the same.
• Escape Pod: Vers and the Skrulls evacuate their exploding ship and travel to Earth through small ships that eject from it. Carol's is damaged by Talos as she escapes.
• Even Evil Has Loved Ones: Talos is seen telling a fallen Skrull he planned to finish their mission while disguised as the S.H.I.E.L.D. director. He also shows up unexpectedly at Maria's house after they assume one of her neighbors was a Skrull in disguise. However, though he implied it, he doesn't hurt nor put Maria in a dangerous situation, and all he asks is that they listen to a black box recording he recovered. Said black box reveals Yon-Rogg actually shot down the test ship Mar-Vell and Carol were in, and that she was secretly helping to save the Skrull. From that point on he is seen in a sympathetic light, later embracing his wife and daughter after they find Mar-Vell's cloaked ship which some Skrull refugees were hiding in.
• Even Evil Has Standards: Yon-Rogg is Carol's major direct antagonist who has no problem with lying to and manipulating her for years, but even he thinks Ronan (and the other Accusers) bombing enemies indiscriminately is taking things too far.
• Evil Gloating: After Talos leaves Fury downed, he takes a moment to gloat and comment on Keller's glasses. Then as he begins to brush his hands off, he's hit with a photon blast by Carol, who has just arrived on the scene.
• Exotic Equipment: Implied, when, after an autopsy is performed on the slain Skrull, Fury and his boss lift the sheet to glance at what lies down below, and they look at each other. Fury then walks away awkwardly.
• Expository Hairstyle Change: In The Stinger, Carol sports longer hair, considering it takes place decades after the events of the movie, following Avengers: Infinity War.
• Eye Scream: Downplayed for laughs. Fury's eye gets damaged because a Flerken scratched it. Coulson later asks if he got it due to torture by the Kree, which Fury neither confirms nor denies.

Tropes F to O

• Failure Montage: When the Skrull dig through Carol's memories, we see a collection different scenes where she falls down and someone criticizes her.
• Fake American: In-Universe, Talos normally speaks with Ben Mendolsohn's native Australian accent, but to impersonate Fury's boss Keller, he adopts an American accent. He drops the accent after Fury blows his cover.
• Fake Memories: The fear of this is an important element in the movie — Vers has a repeating dream that may or may not be from her past, and after the Skrulls use a mind-reading machine to try to dig into her past and she goes to Earth, she begins to remember more and more of a past as Carol Danvers... but she isn't certain what she remembers is real, contributing to her identity crisis. The dream is false, although it isn't clear if it was deliberately faked or simply shifted around as dreams are wont to do — she later remembers what actually happened, which is almost exactly the same... except her blood is red, and it wasn't a Skrull that menaced her, it was Yon-Rogg.
• Fakin' MacGuffin: Carol distracts her former teammates by carrying a lunchbox that they think the Tesseract is inside.
• Family of Choice: Carol doesn't get along with her parents, which is why she's closer to the Rambeaus who treat her as their own. In return, Carol supports Maria as pilot and single mother.
• Fanservice Extra: The surfer girl whom Talos impersonates. She wears a form-fitting scuba suit and swimming trunks that expose her legs. Her bare upper chest and backside are also briefly seen when Talos is in the middle of transforming into her.
• Faster-Than-Light Travel: The Skrulls are searching for Dr. Lawson because she was developing a faster-than-light engine, which would allow them to escape the galaxy and outside the Kree's reach. Presumably, the interstellar jump technology used by spacefaring races is limited to the jump points and everywhere within range. Yon-Rogg notes they're 22 hours away from the nearest jump point when Carol calls them for backup, thus they sit out the bulk of the film's action traveling at sublight speeds. A true FTL drive might be able to take the Skrulls somewhere far enough from established jump points that following them is effectively impossible. It is then revealed that Lawson's experiment involved using the Tesseract, a.k.a. the Space Stone, which makes it possible for one to travel anywhere in the universe.
• Fighting for a Homeland: The Skrulls' motivation for standing against the Kree and searching for Lawson's energy core stems from want of a place where the Kree can't track and hunt them down.
• Final Battle: Carol and her friends face off against Starforce and Ronan's fleet in orbit, with a brief dogfight between Maria and Minn-Erva also taking place in a canyon.
• Final Solution: The Kree Empire and God-Emperor, the Supreme Intelligence, is trying to exterminate the shapeshifting Skrulls — every single one of them. It justifies itself by calling them a dangerous threat, and even terrorists, but Carol doesn't think they are really that dangerous after Talos calls for a truce.
• Five-Second Foreshadowing:
  • When Fury encounters Carol and Carol explains what Skrulls are, one can see Coulson smirking in response to that description, since he's one of them.
  • At the Rambeaus' house, Carol reveals her powers by heating up Maria's teakettle. In previous cases, she would blast a hole through objects. This is the first hint that she recognizes Maria as a friend, and the house was once her home.
  • In the last vision that reveals Carol's true past, the unknown spacecraft that is pursuing Carol and Dr. Lawson's plane is a Kree fighter, which is a clear giveaway to the identity of the mysterious gunman that appears in Carol's previous dreams and flashbacks before it's shortly revealed later that it was Yon-Rogg.
  • On board Mar-Vell's lab, Maria asks why there is so much human memorabilia and why so much of it is for kids, such as the Fonzie lunchbox. Carol and Maria then notice a still-warm mug on the table and realize that the place isn't deserted. Seconds later, Talos calls the Skrull refugees out of hiding, including children.
  • Goose snuggles with Talos, freaking him out. Cats only do that, however, if they like someone. She was telling Nick and Carol that Talos wasn't the real villain.
  • Goose appearing to switch sides and show affection to one of the Kree soldiers is a momentary hint that the Kree she's rubbing herself against is Talos.
  • Nick Fury stating to Goose that he's trusting her not to eat him after seeing her true nature as a Flerken pretty much guarantees that he'll lose his eye to her in light of Fury's story about losing an eye to someone he trusted in Captain America: The Winter Soldier. That story plays out immediately after the battle is over.
• Fluffy the Terrible: Goose the cat is treated as a menace by every alien that sees her. Quite rightfully so.
• Flying Brick: Much like Superman. Carol shoots energy beams, but she also has enough Super-Strength and Super-Toughness to smash her way right through the Kree fleet, seemingly effortlessly, and send Ronan fearfully running away when she demolishes a big battleship.
• Foe Romantic Subtext: Carol and Yon-Rogg, not helped by their rather touchy-feely training sessions. By the beginning of the film, he is a touchstone to Carol in the Kree society, someone she can always turn to and does after her nightmares. She flirts with him briefly on their way back from a private gym he takes her to train at, and they are said to have a tight bond. He, on the other hand, is said to genuinely care for Carol as he finds her humanity attractive and irresistible (Jude Law in Captain Marvel - The Official Movie Special). He does stand up for her to Starforce, asserting she is stronger than they think, is visibly relieved at hearing she is alive and angry at losing touch with her, and lies to Ronan to keep him from bombing Earth while she is there.
• Foregone Conclusion:
  • We know that the Tesseract will end up in S.H.I.E.L.D. custody by the time Thor rolls around. It just takes Goose a while to cough the thing up.
  • Obviously, the Kree aren't going to successfully carpet bomb Earth in the climax.
  • Ronan is going to survive the movie since he goes on to be the main bad guy in Guardians of the Galaxy (2014). Korath, one of the Starforce members, will also survive to appear in that film.
• Foreshadowing:
  • The movie starts with Carol's, who has been adopted by the Kree, viewpoint. If you've watched Guardians of the Galaxy (2014), you'll know that the Kree are the antagonistic faction, thus hinting who the real bad guys are.
  • One that's easy to miss: when Carol first lands inside the Blockbuster, she takes a moment to examine a copy of The Right Stuff, which is a film about test pilots and astronauts. Carol herself is a test pilot turned astronaut.
  • Another very subtle one: Carol calling Fury a "full-bird colonel", a bit of purely American military slang which a Kree wouldn't know.
  • There are a number of hints that the Tesseract is the artifact the Kree and the Skrulls are looking for:
    • It holds the secret for a new form of faster-than-light engine that provides access to places that regular FTL can't reach. The Tesseract contains the Space Stone, the Infinity Stone that grants access to anywhere in the universe.
    • The flashbacks show that the energy involved is a bright blue. This is the signature color of the Tesseract and the Space Stone.
    • Dr. Lawson was involved with Project Pegasus, the very same project that was studying the Tesseract in The Avengers.
  • Minn-Erva offhandedly remarks that she's been to Earth once before, and that it's "a real shithole". Turns out she was with Yon-Rogg when he killed Mar-Vell and captured Carol.
  • The Skrull whom Carol chases to the train actually gives a polite smile to the old lady (whom he later impersonates) when she gets off the train. While it might be that he's just being pragmatic by blending in with the humans, it's a nice clue that the Skrulls aren't as bad as they seemed to be.
  • While not unprecedented for a bad guy, a disguised Talos almost blowing his cover to pay his last respects to one of his fallen soldiers is a good hint that he's not as bad as he appears. In fact, he's not a bad guy at all.
  • There's a very curiously significant closeup of Goose carefully watching Nick Fury long before we learn that she's more than just a cat.
  • When Fury asks if Talos is scared of cats, the Skrull asks what a cat is. Meaning there is an alien species that looks exactly like an Earth cat that is extremely deadly. A species that Goose is a part of.
  • Upon finding the Tesseract, Goose paws at it, directly touching it with no ill effect, showing she’s more than just a cat.
  • When the Kree put a muzzle on Goose, Fury incredulously says, "It's a cat, not Hannibal Lecter!" True, but both of them do eat people.
  • The nature of the climax is foreshadowed by the prominence of the Space Invaders arcade game. Much like that game, the battle between Carol in her Binary form and Ronan's world-killers involves a single small figure (Carol) rising up from the ground to fire at wide, alien crafts firing downward that always fall to a One-Hit Kill from the lone fighter.
  • Monica asks if she can fly up and meet Carol half way after she finds the Skrulls a new home. Fury says, "Only if you learn to glow like your Auntie Carol." Well, she'll become the super-heroine Photon thanks to the events of WandaVision.
• A Form You Are Comfortable With:
  • The Supreme Intelligence is said to be so unknowable that it appears to any person who perceives it as the being whom they hold in the highest regard. It appears to Carol as Mar-Vell, the Kree who served as her mentor on Earth.
  • Goose arguably fits into this trope. To Nick Fury and the other Earthlings, she's just a pretty harmless cat and mostly acts as such. However, the alien species are all understandably afraid of it, which is later shown when Goose first eats the Tesseract, and later some Kree soldiers that blocked Nick, Monica, and the Skrull refugees from escaping.
• Formally-Named Pet: Fury previously owned a pet cat named Mr. Snoofers.
• Freak Lab Accident: While initially presented as being a gift from the Kree, it's eventually revealed Carol's superpower came about due to Mar-Vell's experiments with the Tesseract. Not wanting the Kree to capture the energy cell, Carol shot it and her body was infused with the Tesseract's energy during the ensuing explosion.
• Friend to All Children: While Carol tends to be snarky and dismissive with other adults, she gets along very well with kids, being close friends with Maria's daughter Monica, and quickly earning the respect of the Skrull children at Mar-Vell's lab.
• The Gadfly: When Carol and Fury are locked in a room, Fury uses tape to transfer a fingerprint to the fingerprint scanner, unlocking the door and allowing them out. They reach another locked door, and when Fury is ready to use the piece of tape again, Carol simply blasts the door. Fury grumbles about Carol watching him do the tape thing when she had a faster solution, and she responds, "I didn't want to steal your thunder" with an amused look.
  Nick Fury: You sat there and watched me play with tape, when all you had to do was...
  Carol Danvers: I didn't want to steal your thunder.
• Gadgeteer Genius:
  • Within hours of landing on Earth, Carol is able to salvage communications equipment from Radio Shack and use the parts to modify a pay phone so she can communicate with Starforce. Later, she also modifies Fury's pager so he can contact her, saying it has a range of a couple of galaxies at least.
  • Talos's "science guy" Norex spends a night modifying a Quadjet so it can be flown into space, including adding an Artificial Gravity switch to the cockpit.
• Gamer Chick: One of Carol's memories is her playing Street Fighter II in Pancho's Bar.^note This is an error, as Carol was taken from Earth in 1989, while Street Fighter II came out in 1991.
• Gaslighting: Yon-Rogg and the Supreme Intelligence try to convince "Vers" that she's always been a Kree and that the Skrulls are insidious terrorists that need to be wiped out. They both know perfectly well that neither of those things are true, and Carol herself is, to put it mildly, not pleased to find out the truth.
• Gender Equals Breed: Averted. Goose is a female orange tabby.
• Gender Flip:
  • Mar-Vell is a woman this time around. Namely Carol's mentor on Earth, Dr. Wendy Lawson.
  • The Kree Supreme Intelligence appears to Carol as a woman. This is more of A Form You Are Comfortable With than an actual flip; everyone is said to perceive the Supreme Intelligence differently, but even so the Supreme Intelligence is male in the comics, and never appears as anything else.
• Glasses Pull: Coulson after talking to the rent-a-cop at the Blockbuster.
• Godzilla Threshold: Yon-Rogg is not a fan of the Accusers and their "nuke it from orbit" operating procedure, and tries to keep them away from Earth. Then he realizes that Carol is getting her memories back. Knowing how powerful she could be and how royally pissed she will be once she figures out what's going on, he calls Ronan and tells him to hit Earth, fast and hard.
• Going Native: Talos takes a liking to Terran culture and cuisine after being on the planet for less than a day. The Skrull refugees Mar-Vell brought to Earth have gone even further, as they all wear Terran clothing, play pinball games and watch US television shows.
• Golden Super Mode: Carol's binary mode, where she is surrounded by a golden glow and her eyes turn golden as well.
  Fury: Do you know you're glowing?
• Good All Along: The Skrulls are actually just people who are trying to survive and find a place where they can live in peace. The Kree are the bad guys.
• Good Costume Switch: When Carol learns the true nature of the Kree and Skrulls, she decides she's done wearing the Kree colors and alters the uniform to her red, blue, and yellow scheme based off an Air Force logo on Monica's clothing. Yon-Rogg takes exception to that.
  Yon-Rogg: What did you do to your uniform?
• Government Conspiracy: Project Pegasus a.k.a. Dr. Lawson and her work on the Light Speed Engine is so highly classified that even a S.H.I.E.L.D. operative like Fury who can get into a Black Site with no red tape gets detained for asking about it. It turns out the military is covering up several things about it: the project was a failure thanks to Kree interference, Dr. Lawson was actually a rogue Kree scientist named Mar-Vell who had become allied with the Skrulls, the test pilot Carol wasn't killed but rather kidnapped by the Kree, and most importantly the government was creating technology based on researching the Tesseract.
• Greater-Scope Villain: The Supreme Intelligence isn't very prominent, but plays a heavy role in the plot by driving the Kree Empire's efforts in expansion and genocide, not to mention having brainwashed Carol.
• Grievous Harm with a Body: When Carol breaks free from the Skrulls' mind-reading machine, she throws Talos at his mooks, knocking them down.
• Grin of Audacity: Carol unlocking her binary state causes the power on Mar-Vell's ship to go haywire and cut out, including extinguishing the force field bars of the jail cell where the Skrulls are all being held. Cue Talos grinning as he prepares to fight their captors.
• Groin Attack: During the fight in the records room, Talos delivers a Curb-Stomp Battle to Fury, which includes throwing him against a shelf and kicking him in the groin, which leaves Fury curled up in pain.
• Guilt-Free Extermination War: According to the Kree, if they don't stop the Skrulls, then they will infiltrate and overrun the entire galaxy, and to that end, they must be destroyed. Turns out this is far from the truth; the Kree have essentially already defeated the Skrulls, and the few that remain are refugees desperately trying to escape the Kree.
• Hairball Humor: Parodied in the stinger which has Goose, a catlike alien, coughing up the Tesseract.
• Half-Human Hybrid: Carol's human DNA was augmented with Kree DNA, making her more like the Kree. Usually hybrids are made from interspecies romance, but this was from an Emergency Transformation. Or at least this is what the Kree have told her. The truth is that she got her cosmic powers from a power cell explosion, but as Yon-Rogg exclaims, she still did undergo a blood transfusion. Her conventional abilities, such as superior healing factor, strength, agility, longevity, endurance, and so on, derive from the blood transfusion and potential genetic meddling by the Kree (in order for the blood supply to replenish itself they had to alter her DNA at the very least). This is witnessed by the fact that even without her cosmic powers, Carol Danvers can still hold up against Kree warriors, while not being significantly more powerful than them.
• Hallway Fight: A few fights occur in the halls of Mar-Vell's ship. One gunfight becomes one-sided as Goose the Flerken simply picks up the enemies, who have nowhere to run, and devours them.
• Headbutt of Love: Talos presses his forehead against his wife and daughter's when he is reunited with them on Mar-Vell's ship.
• Heel–Face Turn:
  • Carol performs one after discovering the truth about her origins and the Kree-Skrull War.
  • As explained in Carol's flashback, Mar-Vell originally fought the war on the side of the Kree, but she turned against them and decided to help the Skrulls.
• Helmets Are Hardly Heroic: We do see Carol in Mar-Vell's iconic helmet from the comics now and then, but even in her uniform she's more likely to be shown without it.
• Heroic BSoD: Carol doesn't react well when she learns that Yon-Rogg lied to her, kidnapped her, and turned her into a weapon to serve the Kree and wipe out the Skrull.
• Heroic Resolve: The Supreme Intelligence attempts to break Carol by showing her memories of her failures, but she is reminded in each instance she fell that she was able to persevere and get up again. Carol destroys the Power Limiter implant placed on her, allowing her to access her full powers, and blasts out of Supreme Intelligence's hold.
• Heroic Sacrifice: Norex, Talos's "science guy", impersonates Carol and remains on Earth while the real Carol, Fury, Maria, and Talos can search for Mar-Vell's lab without Starforce interfering. This costs him his life when his cover is blown.
• Hero Stole My Bike: A biker makes fun of Carol's uniform, then makes a pass at her. When she ignores him, he calls her a freak, then steps into a store. Carol steals some local clothes and then steals the man's motorcycle.
• He Went That Way: Fury sarcastically asks Vers if she's seen a lady dressed for laser tag who crashed through the roof of the Blockbuster store. She halfheartedly points in some direction and tries to walk away.
• Hold Your Hippogriffs: "Motherflerken!" Although this might be a case of Last-Second Word Swap, given there are children nearby.
• Holy Halo: As Carol looks down on Yon-Rogg for the final time, fully realized as one of the most powerful beings in the universe and a force for good, the sun is behind her giving her a halo effect around her head.
• How Do I Shot Web?: When Carol throws down with her former comrades from the Kree Starforce, she is still not used to her photon blasts being unleashed from the control implant, and the law of action and reaction sends her flying backwards when she lets rip on her foes.
• Human Aliens: Most of the Kree look like humans with blue skin, but some such as Korath and Yon-Rogg have skin tones identical to those of Earth's humans. This seems to build on the comics, where the Kree were Nordic-looking human aliens originally and became blue only later (possibly even through a coloration mistake at first). The discrepancy was eventually resolved through the Retcon that there are two distinct Kree subspecies, the completely human-looking White Kree (sometimes called "Pink Kree" as a term of abuse) and the Blue Kree that moviegoers will be more familiar with. In the movie, this is used to conceal from Carol that she is actually a white human who looks like a White Kree, and for Mar-Vell to disguise that she is a White Kree pretending to be a white human.
• Identity Amnesia: Carol explains to Maria that she gets flashes of memory about a life on Earth, and doesn't know if those memories are real or not.
  Maria Rambeau: So, you don't remember anything?
  Carol Danvers: It's hard to explain. I keep having these memories. I see flashes. I think I had a life here, but I can't tell if it's real.
• I Have Your Wife: Implied when Talos meets with Carol, Maria and Fury. He then draws their attention to a Skrull impersonating Maria, who's standing with her daughter.
• Impostor Forgot One Detail: Since Skrulls can only access their targets' recent memories, this is a way to Spot the Impostor.
  • Talos, impersonating Director Keller, gives himself away when he calls Fury "Nicholas" instead of Fury.
  • Norex impersonates Carol to temporarily stall Yon-Rogg while she, Maria, Talos, and Fury make their way to Mar-Vell's ship. While she tells him her identification code and the answers to some of the test questions Yon-Rogg might ask of him, she fails to tell him which Kree supplied her his blood (Yon-Rogg). When Yon-Rogg asks him this, and Norex is unable to come up with an answer, Yon-Rogg realizes this is an imposter and shoots Norex dead.
• Improvised Weapon: When Carol faces her old squad aboard Mar-Vell's cruiser, Bron-Char picks up an arcade cabinet and hurls it downward at Carol. She blasts through it, sending Bron-Char flying as well.
• Infantilization Retaliation: After escaping from the Kree, Nick Fury lifts and coos at the housecat-resembling-flerken Goose, despite that he's seen that it's much more dangerous than it looks. Goose snarls, and when that doesn't dissuade Fury it claws him in the face, costing him an eye.
• Insult Backfire: Carol is on the receiving end of one that backfires so spectacularly it triggers her Heroic Second Wind:
  Supreme Intelligence: On Hala, you were reborn. Without us, you are only human.
  Carol: You are right. [sees flashes of her past] I am human.
• Internal Homage: The film as a whole is structured and designed to be more reminiscent of the Marvel Cinematic Universe's Phase 1 films than the other Phase 3 movies. It's rather fitting since this film is actually the second-earliest MCU film in the overall timeline (with Captain America: The First Avenger being the earliest).
• Internal Reveal: We all know that "Vers" is originally from Earth and that her real name is Carol Danvers. However, Carol herself doesn't know this and learning the truth about her own origin halfway through the movie gives her quite a surprise, and she begins to find out even more about her past from that point on.
• Interservice Rivalry: Within the Kree military, it's clear that the Starforce and the Accuser Corps don't see eye to eye, as Ronan wastes no time pinning the blame for the failure of the Torfa mission on Yon-Rogg's team, while Yon-Rogg has nothing but open contempt for the Accusers' habit of solving every problem with Orbital Bombardment.
• Invincible Hero: Per the producers, Carol is the most powerful hero in the Marvel movies, and this is brilliantly confirmed in her own movie. For most of the movie, she is not this because of the Power Limiter on her neck, being captured or defeat through trickery or force of arms. Then, after her final confrontation with the Supreme Intelligence, her enemies just have nothing left that can credibly threaten her in any way, and she proceeds to rain down a complete Curb-Stomp Battle on an Accuser cruiser and all the ships it can muster , forcing even Ronan the Accuser to run away in fear from her.
• Isn't It Ironic?:
  • While Hole's "Celebrity Skin" was probably picked for the play-out music simply because it's a badass-sounding nineties rock song with a female singer, the extremely dark lyrics (mostly about being a washout) are a very bad fit for Carol being triumphant at the end of the film.^note It's also out of continuity for a film that leans so hard on its 1995 setting, as "Celebrity Skin" came out in 1998, not 1995.
  • Averted (and in fact, actually enhancing the original irony) with the usage of No Doubt's "Just a Girl", as the already sarcastic lyrics go one step further when verses such as "I'm just a girl, all pretty and petite" are heard as Carol is beating up Starforce all by herself.
• It's Personal with the Dragon: The Supreme Intelligence is the leader, but Carol's final conflict is with Yon-Rogg, who shot her down, killed her mentor and then abducted her to be a soldier for the Kree.
• It Works Better with Bullets: In the fight in the record vault, Fury manages to take Talos's gun and attempts to shoot him, only to realize too late that Talos was able to drop the clip and clear the chamber during the struggle.
• I've Heard of That — What Is It?: When he's told Goose is a cat, Talos insists that she's not a cat, but a Flerken. Later on, when Monica asks him if he can turn into a cat, he asks what a cat is.
• Jerkass Has a Point: During the flashback to the Go Kart race, a young Carol is very patronizingly told to slow down by her older brother. Carol smirks and speeds up... and because she is going too fast around a corner she ends up crashing into a hay bale and hurting herself.
• Just Train Wrong: The train fight starts on the C Line at Douglas station in El Segundo, but towards the end abruptly jumps to the A Line and ends with the train pulling into Seventh Street / Metro Center in downtown Los Angeles, a journey that is impossible to make without the train reversing through a connector track at Willowbrook / Rosa Parks.
• Killer Rabbit: Goose is not a regular house cat. She's a Flerken, which are widely acknowledged as some of the most dangerous creatures in the galaxy, even capable of eating an Infinity Stone unharmed, though she did spit it back out after a while.
• Kindhearted Cat Lover:
  • Who would have thought that the no-nonsense hardass founder of the Avengers once melted into a sweet goofball at the sight of a fluffy kitty cat back in the 1990s?
  • Another cat lover is Goose's original owner, Mar-Vell, the most kindhearted Kree we've ever seen in the MCU.
• Know When to Fold 'Em:
  • After witnessing Carol single-handedly neutralize his Orbital Bombardment, annihilate his entire fighter screen and destroy an entire battlecruiser simply by flying through it, Ronan wisely decides to order the rest of his fleet to jump the hell away from Earth orbit.
  • Yon-Rogg's attempt to convince Carol to fight without her powers just gets him blasted several meters into the rubble behind him. He understands he's far outclassed, so when Carol extends her hand, he wisely takes it.
• Last-Name Basis: Fury claims that everyone, including his mother, calls him Fury. This becomes a Chekhov's Gun as Talos calling him "Nicholas" while masquerading as his boss is the first thing that tips off Fury.
• Leaning on the Fourth Wall: When the Skrulls are piecing through Carol's memories, Talos's comments are basically indirectly referring to the editing of the film itself, complaining about how confusing everything is and ordering them to start at the beginning.
• Left the Background Music On: Nirvana's "Come as you are" plays when Carol wakes up in the Supreme Intelligence's virtual world for the second time. The camera then pans over to a record player playing it.
• Let's Fight Like Gentlemen: Yon-Rogg attempts this with Carol, throwing down his weapons and suggesting they go hand-to-hand, telling her that when she can beat him without her photon powers, she'll truly be "ready". Carol just blasts him into a nearby rock, telling him that she doesn't need to prove herself to him.
• Light 'em Up: Carol's powers are thematically based around this due to her being able to emit plasma bolts in combat.
• Lima Syndrome: Though Yon-Rogg is responsible for abducting Carol and gaslighting her for six years to fight for the Kree Empire, he's developed some affection for her. He donated his blood to save her life, and he lies to Ronan and prevents him from bombing Earth while she's on it. He is ready to ease her mind after nightmares, whatever the hour, and also defends her to other Starforce members, claiming "She is stronger than you think!" (the exact opposite his character says in the trailer), indicating having genuine faith in Carol.
• Line-of-Sight Name:
  • Carol got the name "Vers" (pronounced "Veers") among the Kree after Yon-Rogg only found half of her broken dogtag only showing the last "-vers" in "Danvers".
  • Nick Fury renames his PROTECTOR Initiative when he sees Carol's combat nickname on her fighter to AVENGERS.
• Loads and Loads of Loading: There's an Overly Long Gag of Carol, Maria, Fury, Talos, and "science guy" Norex waiting for the Black Box recording to load on Maria's Windows 95 PC. Maria and Fury are used to it, while both Carol and Talos are confused by the wait.
• Logo Joke: As the first movie to be released after the death of Stan Lee, the opening montage that typically shows Marvel characters instead features an assortment of Lee's cameo appearances in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
  Thank you, Stan.invoked
• Lost in Transmission: During the assignment on Torfa to rescue Soh-larr, Starforce splits into two groups, Minn-Erva and At-Lass in one and the rest in the other. Yon-Rogg tries to communicate instructions to Minn-Erva, but his voice dissolves into static, and she can't make out what her orders are. Both groups go on with the mission and eventually meet up again once fighting breaks out. Carol's only gotten a warning that they're being ambushed when "Soh-larr" reveals that he's actually Talos.
• MacGuffin: Two for the price of one: the Light Speed Engine developed by Dr. Lawson and the energy core that powers it. The Skrulls and Kree are very interested in the former and latter respectively, the Skrulls because they want to use the engine to escape the Kree's genocidal onslaught and the Kree because the energy core is the Tesseract, one of the Infinity Stones. The titular character ultimately derives her powers from the Space Stone thanks to her destroying the engine and absorbing the energy stored within.
• Major Injury Underreaction:
  • When Mar-Vell was mortally wounded —
    Carol: Your blood... it's blue!
    Mar-Vell: Yes, but how's my hair?
  • Fury seems more annoyed than pained after Goose claws out his left eye, unaware that it won't heal. It's possible that it really was "just a scratch" that got infected.
• Meaningful Echo: When Fury is cornered by some aggressors, one of them says to him, "Just like Havana." This is the same phrase Fury used to trick Talos earlier, cluing him in that this "Kree" is actually Talos.
• Meaningful Name: It was revealed at the denouement of the film that Carol's Air Force callsign was "Avenger" — which gives Fury the idea for his lifelong defense plan: "The Avengers Initiative."
• Men Like Dogs, Women Like Cats: Inverted. Carol and Fury run into a cat named Goose at Project Pegasus. Carol doesn't pay any attention to it, but Fury loves it. Somewhat less so after it's revealed it's really a SPACE MONSTER CAT that destroys his eye. Though he still has a bed for the "cat" in his office afterward.
• Meta Origin: The engine that gave Carol her powers is revealed to have been powered by the energy of the Tesseract, which Mar-Vell was studying. This means that Carol's powers ultimately originate in one of the Infinity Stones, namely the Space Stone.
• Metaphorically True:
  • Nick Fury's claim in The Winter Soldier about how he lost his eye to someone he trusted is not entirely wrong. He did adore the cat who clawed said eye and had previously said he trusted her not to eat him.
  • Yon-Rogg and Supreme Intelligence keep telling "Vers" that "what's given can be taken away", supposedly referencing her cosmic powers. What they actually gave to her is the Power Limiter, which indeed can be taken away.
• Military Maverick: Discussed by Fury. En route to the base where Project Pegasus was headquartered, Vers claims that she's on Earth to stop the Skrulls. Fury doesn't buy it, saying that war is a universal language and he recognizes a rogue soldier when he sees one. Later, after Coulson covers their escape, Fury speaks admiringly about Coulson's disobedience and ability to judge when to do the right thing.
• Minor Major Character: The S.H.I.E.L.D. Director Keller is mostly Out of Focus due to being compromised and impersonated by Talos.
• Mistaken for an Imposter: Carol assumes Maria's neighbor Tom is Talos in disguise and speaks to him as such. After Maria asks her confused neighbor to come back tomorrow and closes the door, they find out that Talos is actually standing behind them in the living room.
  Talos: You know, you should be kinder to your neighbors. You never know when you want to borrow some sugar.
• Mistaken for Gay: Implied. The way Maria's neighbor Tom stutters and looks at Maria and Carol, the latter of which acts somewhat like a Clingy Jealous Girl (Carol thought the neighbor was a disguised Talos), suggests that he feels awkward for being a Moment Killer of some sort.
• Mistakes Are Not the End of the World: When Carol's former mentor (the Supreme Intelligence) tries to imply that she's inferior due to falling down whenever she first put her mind to doing anything as a kid, Carol retorts that this does not make her inferior because she would always get up and try again after falling.
• Mook Horror Show:
  • A short one plays out as Fury and Maria are pursued by enemies and Maria runs out of ammo. As the Starforce soldiers close in on them, Goose sprouts a bunch of giant tentacles from her mouth and grabs all the Kree. Cut to a shot from an adjacent hallway, where the waving tentacles pull them out of sight, and screaming and slurping are heard as they get eaten.
  • The way that Carol tears through the Kree Accuser fleet looks a lot like a supervillain in a space-themed anime destroying the Redshirt Army fleet before the mecha-jock or Ace Pilot hero enters play, down to the worried expressions of Ronan and his officer aboard their command ship.
• Mugging the Monster: A deleted scene had a biker pull up to and harass Carol. She swiftly turns out to not be an easy mark and he winds up paying for it with his motorcycle.
• Musicalis Interruptus: In the climax, when Yon-Rogg challenges Carol to a fistfight, an impressive piece of music starts playing.... and abruptly stops as soon as Carol blasts him away effortlessly.
• My God, What Have I Done?: Upon seeing the Skrull refugees, including Talos's family, aboard Mar-Vell's cruiser, Carol momentarily breaks down and apologizes for her actions against the Skrulls. Talos makes it clear that he doesn't hold anything against her.
• My Suit Is Also Super: Carol's costume isn't just a bold fashion choice. It's Kree Starforce military armor, so probably includes some kind of protective quality, as well as built-in sensors, communications, universal translator, collapsible helmet to provide life support in vacuum, and the ability to change color.
• Mythology Gag:
  • The scene where Carol changes her uniform's colors features several nods to various Captain Marvel costumes (and their wearers) over the years, as well as DC's Shazam! — who originally went by Captain Marvel himself.
  • The alias that Mar-Vell uses on Earth is "Dr. W. Lawson" (Wendy instead of Walter). The version from the Ultimate Marvel comics also worked on a faster-than-light engine, betraying the Kree to save their intended alien victims by allowing them to have interstellar travel as well (in that case, it was the human race).
  • In the Comics, Monica Rambeau is another superhero (and occasional Avenger) who has also used the name "Captain Marvel"^note And given her young age in this film, puts her at the right age to show up in future movies. Her mother Maria's pilot call sign is shown to be "Photon", a name Monica used after setting aside the Marvel name.
  • The Lawson that the Supreme Intelligence uses as an avatar to show itself to Carol is a white-haired Mar-Vell, while the real one that had turned against the Kree and wanted to protect others was blonde. In the comics, the honorable but relentless Kree soldier Mar-Vell had silvery white hair; when he achieved Cosmic Awareness and enlightenment that transformed him into a protector and universal hero, his hair turned gold.
  • Jim Starlin's run of Captain Marvel introduced the Cosmic Cube as the instrument of Thanos' ascent to godhood. This film reconnects the Captain Marvel mythos with this iconic item.
  • Carol's nickname for Monica, Lieutenant Trouble, was originally for Katherine Renner, one of Carol's biggest fangirls in the comics.
  • In the second stinger, Goose hacks up the Tesseract like a hairball. In the comics, an Inhuman named Barf is able to vomit up anything he visualizes, including a piece of the Cosmic Cube.
  • Soh-Larr is a Kree spy investigating the Skrulls. In the comics, he was the father of the first Kree-Skrull hybrid, Dorrek Supreme.
  • Yon-Rogg tells Carol that he's training her because he wants her to be the best she can be. The final trade of Carol's 2005 series was titled Best You Can Be (as a Bookend to the first one, Best of the Best).
  • Before Carol leaves for space, Monica talks about wishing she could visit her, even travelling halfway if necessary. In the comics, given Monica's powers, travelling into space is a cinch for her. Fury also tells her it's unlikely unless "you learn to glow like your auntie." Monica Rambeau's superpower is to literally turn herself into light.
  • In Talos' ship, some of the Skrull technicians are noticeably shorter, with bigger eyes and less human-like features than the regular Skrulls, resembling the Skrulls' look in their very first appearance in the comics◊.
  • Secret Invasion also featured an Alien Autopsy of a Skrull, as a proof of an alien infiltration (in that comic, it meant that they could now infiltrate with higher ease than before, in the film it's the proof of their existence). And, also like in the comic, one of the people overseeing the autopsy is also a Skrull in disguise.
  • Carol is shown playing Street Fighter II in a flashback. It's not Carol's first time interacting with Ryu and co.
  • When Fury's hesitant to handle the Tesseract, Carol sarcastically asks if he wants an oven mitt, referencing Loot Crate's infamous Infinity Gauntlet oven mitt.
  • The metallic tentacles utilized by the Kree to interface with the Supreme Intelligence are likely an allusion to the Combat Tentacles utilized by the true form of the Supreme Intelligence in the original comics.
  • When Carol and Fury meet at Pancho's and she questions him about his past, he says he ended his military career as "a full-bird colonel". This is word for word how Carol describes herself in the graphic novel Avengers: Endless Wartime.
  • A major plot point involves The Reveal that Carol lost her memories of her real past on Earth, and had Fake Memories implanted in her mind by the Kree. This was likely inspired by the famous storyline in X-Men where Carol lost her memories and powers after they were absorbed by Rogue, who was a supervillain at the time.
  • Carol dropping from outer space through the atmosphere to Earth is referencing the first issue of 2012 Captain Marvel run.
• "Near and Dear" Baby Naming: The film proper ends with Fury, inspired by meeting superhero Carol Danvers, to come up with the Protector Initiative, whereby S.H.I.E.L.D. will seek out other heroes to protect the Earth from alien threats. As he starts working on his baby, he spots Carol's picture and her callsign and renames it the Avenger Initiative in her honor.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero:
  • After learning more about Project Pegasus, Fury calls for backup to meet him at the Nevada base. What he doesn't know is that Director Keller is actually Talos in disguise.
  • Carol's decision to leave the Tesseract on Earth at the end of the film won't cause any problems for Earth in the long run.
• Nice Job Fixing It, Villain:
  • For the Kree, taking Carol to Hala and hiding the truth about her origins, instead of leaving her behind on Earth. Because it is not as if she would turn against the Kree Empire once she found out the truth about her past...
  • The Supreme Intelligence tries to break Carol's will by showing her memories of her past failures and telling her that without the Kree she is "only human". This has the exact opposite effect as it only reminds Carol that she has always been a Determinator, and she proceeds to overload the Power Limiter they put on her.
• "No More Holding Back" Speech: Carol takes off the electronic implant connecting her to the Supreme Intelligence and announces that she is done with fighting with one arm behind her back.
• No Name Given:
  • The Skrull techie who accompanies Talos to New Orleans is named Norex, but no one refers to him by name in the film. Talos calls him his "science guy".
  • Talos's wife and daughter are not named in the film. In the credits, his wife is given the name Soren. While their daughter is still unnamed, her name is later revealed in Secret Invasion to be G'iah.
• Noodle Implements: After impressing Carol by using scotch tape to lift the print a guard left behind on his S.H.I.E.L.D. badge holder and then using it to open the door, Fury adds she should've seen what he could do with paperclips.
• Noodle Incident: Minn-Erva apparently visited C-53 (Earth) once and all she can say is that the planet is a "shithole". She is seen during the flashback where Yon-Rogg abducts Carol, so the comment refers to that mission.
• Not Helping Your Case: Lampshaded by Carol; the Skrulls reveal that they are actually refugees, and Talos is searching for his wife Soren and daughter G'iah, and that's why he wanted Carol's memories. They make a bad first impression on her by kidnapping her, investigating her mind, then appearing on Earth and shooting at her to kill. While it's justified in that Carol was told to kill Skrulls on sight, they also simply could have talked to her, as they do later. They also try to kill Fury after he leads them to Carol. It's not until Talos offers the black box that triggers Carol's real memories that she believes their story.
• Nothing but Hits: Top-charters like Nirvana, No Doubt, and R.E.M. fill the 90's air.
• Not in Front of the Kid: When he's scratched by Goose, Fury says his actor's favorite F-bomb... but not quite. He says "mother-Flerken" likely because there are children present.
• The Not-Love Interest: Maria Rambeau fills the role, being Carol's best friend, with Carol serving as Honorary Aunt to Maria's daughter (whose father is never even mentioned), along with some subtext. Maria's neighbor also seems to mistake them for a couple.
• Not So Stoic: Yon-Rogg keeps telling Carol that she needs to control her emotions, they're making her weak and compromising her control over her powers. In battle, Carol can be plenty hot-headed and reactionary, and apparently the Kree ideal is for Vulcan-like emotional control at all times in all situations. See The Stoic.
• Not Worth Killing: While she had others reasons to spare him as well, there seems to be a clear aspect of this to how Carol handles Yon-Rogg in the end. That she can treat him with such relative indifference is both a great moral victory for her, and a demonstration of how far her own powers now surpass his.
• Offscreen Moment of Awesome: At the Rambeau household, Talos reveals that he has the contents of the black box with recordings of the incident in 1989. Maria, surprised, says that the government claimed the device was destroyed in the crash and asks how he got it, and he just answers that (as a Skrull) he can get into places he shouldn't be.
• Oh, Crap!:
  • During one scene, Maria looks out a window to see a Skrull disguised as her talking to her daughter. While it's quickly revealed that the Skrulls are not evil, and so the chances of anything actually happening to Monica were low to nil, her fear is still palpable.
  • Yon-Rogg has a brief one when "Vers" tells him she's on C-53 due to the realization that Carol is back on the planet he abducted her from in the first place. It's an early clue that he and the Kree are not the "noble warrior heroes" they appear to be.
  • The Supreme Intelligence starts to visibly panic when Carol uses her Heroic Willpower to break free of their Cold-Blooded Torture.
  • Some of the Skrulls when Nick Fury gets his eye scratched out by a Flerken, since they're already familiar with what'll happen to him.
  • Ronan and his second in command get progressively more apprehensive as they watch Carol carve her way through the Kree Accusers' fleet. Ronan's second in command in particular looks one step away from a total freak-out.
• Older Than They Look: The Stinger directly leading to Avengers: Endgame shows Carol finally back on Earth and meeting The Remnant of the Avengers. Save messy hair, she has not visibly aged a day from the last 20 years.
• Once More, with Clarity:
  • The film opens with Carol having a nightmare where she and another woman are attacked by a Skrull. We later get to see the full scene, except they're not attacked by a Skrull, but Yon-Rogg.
  • The repeated memories where Carol falls down are later repeated to show that she's a Determinator who got back up and kept going every single time.
• Only a Flesh Wound: Fury doesn't seem too bothered that a Flerken scratched his eye, and he believes it'll heal up soon.
• Only One Name:
  • Goose the cat (as well as the four cats who played her: Reggie, Archie, Rizzo and Gonzo).
  • Briefly discussed, when Carol is surprised that Fury has three names, since Kree only have one name.
  • Carol herself as Vers is this to the Kree, having a single-syllable non-hyphenated name in contrast to her teammates Yon-Rogg, Minn-Erva, etc.
• Orbital Bombardment: Done by the Accusers fleet on Torfa early in the film to wipe out the Skrull colony on the planet and create distraction for the Starforce to infiltrate the planet and find their spy Soh-Larr. Later, they attempt to do it on Earth, but they're foiled by Carol.
• Out-of-Character Alert: Talos accidentally blows his cover by addressing Fury as "Nicholas", which no one does.
• Overly Long Gag: The scene where Carol, Maria, Fury, and Talos and his "science guy" are waiting for the black box's recording to load in Maria's '90s computer.
• Overt Operative: Carol wonders aloud whether a baseball cap with the S.H.I.E.L.D. logo on it helps Fury on his secret missions.

Tropes P to Z

• Palette Swap: Once Carol decides she'll no longer fight for the Kree, she undergoes a Good Costume Switch with Monica's help. The design of the uniform remains the same, but the green and silver is turned to red, blue, and yellow.
• Percussive Maintenance: Done with a Skrull tapping on Carol's forehead, of all things, as they are watching her memories. With Talos even telling the guy who did it "that did something, do it again" like they're working with a glitchy old television.
• Period Piece: Set in 1995. This is the second overall period movie in the Marvel Cinematic Universe following Captain America: The First Avenger which was set during World War II.
• Person of Mass Destruction: Carol is so badass that she can take on the whole planet-wrecking Kree battlecruiser and scare even Ronan with her power.
• Perspective Flip: This film is the first time in the MCU where the Kree are not portrayed as outright villains as they were in Guardians of the Galaxy and Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.. Carol is shown explaining to Fury that the Kree are a bunch of "noble warrior heroes" defending the galaxy from the Skrulls. Subverted when the Kree are eventually revealed to still be the same aggressively expansionist supremacists we've come to know and hate.
• Pet the Dog:
  • Talos almost blows his cover to pay his last respects to a fallen Skrull soldier. Of course, it's only a "Pet the Dog" moment until we learn he's not actually a bad guy.
  • Yon-Rogg kidnapping Carol and brainwashing her was Pragmatic Villainy. He reveals, however, that he donated his blood to her as part of an emergency transfusion, rather than letting someone else do it. In the movie proper, he was worried for Vers's well-being and is relieved to see her on Earth, giving her orders to stay put until they can fetch her.
• Phlebotinum-Handling Equipment: While everyone wonders how to keep the Tesseract safe and out of reach from the villains, since Fury refuses to touch it with his bare hands, Goose provides the solution by swallowing it. She's unaffected by it, and people can just carry her instead of handling the cube itself.
• Planet Terra: When Earth first appears on-screen, the Title In refers to it by its Kree designation (Planet C-53) and as "Terran Homeworld".
• Platonic Co-Parenting: It's implied that Carol and Maria raised Monica together. If nothing else, Carol certainly helped out, especially since Monica's father is an Ambiguously Absent Parent.
• Portal Network: Once again, conventional FTL travel is shown to work this way in the MCU. The drawbacks of such a system are shown when one of the factions is forced to sit out the bulk of the movie because they have to spend 22 hours moving at sublight speed to get them to a jump point that will get them to Earth.
• Power Floats: When Carol takes her Power Limiter off she floats gently off the ground, then rapidly learns she can fly.
• Power Glows:
  • The Tesseract glows blue, of course, as do Carol's eyes when [[spoiler:she connects with its power after her crash.
  • Kree melee weapons glow green, as do their bolts from their guns.
  • Carol of course, has hair of gold, heart of gold, and glow of gold.
• Power Incontinence: Carol occasionally has trouble controlling her photon blasts, due to not having practiced with them. For example, in the big fight in Mar-Vell's lab, she launches a huge attack against a handful of Kree that blows them across the room and also blows her across the room. She also doesn't realize that she can fly for most of the movie.
• Power Limiter: Carol spends most of the movie with a small disc on her neck that the Kree said was there to help her control her power. It is actually there to control her by controlling her power, so she can't use it to rebel against the Kree, and to keep her from accessing the full potential of her abilities to keep her reliant on the other Starforce members, and the Kree in general.
• Pragmatic Villainy: The Skrulls do not harm the people they impersonate. Even Keller is left tied up somewhere rather than killed. This serves to highlight that they're not evil like the Main Characters believed them to be but also because, as Talos later says, killing people can unnecessarily complicate their mission.
• Precision F-Strike: Hilariously subverted when Fury says "Motherflerken!" when Goose claws his left eye.
• Prequel: The movie takes place during The '90s, which predate the events of Iron Man, the first movie set in the MCU, but after Captain America: The First Avenger, an earlier prequel.
• Present-Day Past:
  • Carol remembers playing Street Fighter II in the late '80s, despite it being a game from the early '90s.
  • The movie is primarily set in 1995, yet a PC appears to have the 1997 "Windows Desktop Update" installed. Even a regular Windows 95 being already widespread would've been questionable, as it came out in late 1995 - computers at this point in time should've been equipped with Windows 3.1.
  • Maria Rambeau's computer must be running Windows 95 (considering it's 1995), but the icons are from Windows ME/2000, which came out in 1999.
  • The use of Hole's "Celebrity Skin" over the end titles doesn't match the rest of the soundtrack as it was released in 1998.
• Product Placement: After Minn-Erva mistakes a toy dart blaster for the real thing, she briefly turns it so the logo directly faces the camera. It's Nerf or nothing...
• Pronouncing My Name for You: When Fury mispronounces the name of Carol's mentor, Mar-Vell, as "Marvel", Carol chides him, explaining, "It's two words: Mar. Vell." Fury responds that "Marvel" sounds better.
• Protagonist Title: This film is simply titled "Captain Marvel" after the heroine (though she isn't referred to as such at any point).
• Proud Warrior Race Guy: The Kree in general are full of themselves. Carol has this mindset, too, confidently describing the Kree as "noble warrior heroes" to Fury. Once she learns about her past and the nature of the Kree and Skrull conflict, she changes her mind, vowing to destroy the Supreme Intelligence and defend Earth and the Skrulls from the Kree.
• Punctuated! For! Emphasis!: When the Kree capture Carol and force her to commune with the Supreme Intelligence, she growls "Let. Me. Out."
• Puny Earthlings: When a Kree scans Fury, the scanner says that his threat level is "low-to-none". Minn-Erva doesn't seem to think very highly of Earth's civilization, either, if her pithy comment on it is anything to go by. Though given how little time she's likely to have spent on Earth, this could be just because of her personal dislike of Carol.
• Purely Aesthetic Glasses: Talos, impersonating S.H.I.E.L.D. Director Keller, comments to Fury that he doesn't actually need the glasses, but he likes them and they complete the look.
• Race Lift: The Starforce has been rendered as more ethnically diverse than in the source material, as several of the supporting characters who are blue-skinned but otherwise completely European-looking in the comics are played by people of color in the film. Specific examples include:
  • Korath the Pursuer, here played by Djimon Honsou (Black).
  • Att-Lass, played by Algenis Perez Soto (Afro-Latino).
  • Minn-Erva, played by Gemma Chan (Asian).
• Recoil Boost: When Carol blows a hole in the Skrulls' ship, she's nearly hurled into space. She photon-blasts outward, and the recoil sends her back into the ship. Later, after unlocking her full powers, she figures out flight in the same way.
• Recoiled Across the Room: Carol discovers after unlocking her binary state that her blasts are strong enough to blow enemies across the room and herself in the other direction. The first time she blasts someone, she's hurled backwards into an arcade cabinet.
• Recurring Dreams: At the beginning of the film, Carol wakes up from one of her recurring nightmares involving a fiery crash and a woman she doesn't recognize. She refuses to go back to sleep and instead convinces Yon-Rogg to spar with her. The dream is actually a recurring flashback, albeit with some details differing from the actual event, such as her bleeding blue instead of red.
• Red Baron: Maria and Carol's Air Force call signs are "Photon" and "Avenger", respectively.
• Reforged into a Minion: Carol was an ordinary human pilot until she destroyed an engine powered by the Tesseract and absorbed some of its power in the ensuing blast. Rather than kill her, the Kree abducted her so they could use her as a soldier.
• Remember the New Guy?: The Skrulls were known to S.H.I.E.L.D. since the mid-nineties and have interacted with Captain Marvel. The Captain herself has been doing superhero work since about the same time, yet the Skrulls aren't referenced until their debut in this film, and Carol only receives a mention in the stinger of Avengers: Infinity War. This is because the Skrulls simply have been trying to hide from the genocidal Kree, and Carol left Earth to defend them and other planets from the Kree.
• Required Secondary Powers: When quizzed about his shapeshifting ability, Talos confirms that all of his species are capable of doing it, but it crucially needs practice and, on occasion, talent to be able to do it well. They also don't gain the knowledge or memories of whoever they're impersonating, so they have to scan the person's brain to bolster their disguise if they're going undercover...and they only get the most recent memories at that.
• Resolved Noodle Incident: One of the oldest mysteries of the Infinity Saga is how the Cinematic Nick Fury lost his left eye. All audiences had to go on for a decade was Fury's cryptic claim to Steve Rogers in The Winter Soldier that he'd lost his eye the last time he trusted someone. So, Captain Marvel finally dramatizes the incident, and it turns out Nick technically didn't lie to Steve. That broad strokes recap was the truth...except Nick being Nick, he left out some embarassing context. Nick lost the eye because he trusted Goose the Flerken not to eat him. Goose scratched him, however, because Nick kept playing with her chin and finally annoyed the Flerken past the point of endurance.
• Restraining Bolt: Played with. The chip on Carol's neck grants her power but can also be deactivated to take the power away if she goes against Kree orders. It's actually a straight example of the trope as Carol's powers are solely hers. The Kree attached the chip to limit how much power she could use and suppress it entirely if needed. It can also debilitate her enough to make capturing her easy.
• Retraux: The official website is in a '90s style to reflect the setting of the film.
• The Reveal: Several, for both the film and the MCU as a whole.
  • It was Yon-Rogg and the Kree who shot down Carol and Lawson, not the Skrulls.
  • Dr. Lawson was a Kree scientist named Mar-Vell.
  • Fury lost his eye to Goose the cat (or Flerken).
  • Fury got the name for the Avenger(s) Initiative from Carol's callsign, Avenger.
• Rewatch Bonus:
  • After The Reveal that the Skrulls are mostly benevolent and are simply refugees who didn't want to submit to Kree rule, the scenes where they are beaten by Carol and Starforce become a bit more horrific/tragic to watch now that it's clear they're just innocent people desperate to find a home for their families.
  • On a more comedic note, Nick Fury's constantly fussing over Goose the cat during the first act of the film becomes even more hilarious after it's revealed that Goose would be responsible for Fury's left eye getting ruined.
• Riddle for the Ages: We never find out who Yon-Rogg sees when he communes with the Supreme Intelligence.^note A scene cut from the movie revealed it was himself.
• Running Gag:
  • Fury repeatedly coddling Goose and scaring the hell out of Talos with her.
  • Fury's left eye repeatedly getting injured, as the film teases The Reveal of how he got his eye patch.
• Saved by Canon: This film being a Prequel means that Fury, Coulson, Ronan, and Korath (who all appear in chronologically later movies) all have to obviously survive the events of it. As does the Captain herself, as the The Stinger from Avengers: Infinity War shows Fury paging her for help just before his death from Thanos's fingersnap.
• Screw This, I'm Outta Here: After she takes flight and destroys a volley of world threatening missiles, Carol just floats outside Ronan's flagship, the Dark Aster and decides run away.
• Sean Connery Is About to Shoot You: After crashing to Earth into a Blockbuster video store, Carol glimpses a True Lies standee of Arnold Schwarzenegger. As it's a standee that plays this trope straight and she doesn't realize it's cardboard, she shoots it back with a photon blast.
• Sequel Hook: Leaving aside the Stingers, there's a moment as Ronan exits the film with a gleam in his eye, saying he'll be back for Carol.
• Series Continuity Error: This movie shows Nick Fury losing his left eye in 1995, before he became director of S.H.I.E.L.D. However, in Civil War, on a photograph showing him swearing as he takes over the role, he still had both eyes.
• Shapeshifter Default Form: Skrulls are green, wrinkled and pointy-eared. Except for when they choose not to be.
• Shapeshifting Excludes Clothing: The Skrulls don't simulate clothes when taking on a new form, as shown in the sequence on the beach where they assume the form of surfers. In Talos's case, his clothes retreat into a device implanted in his shoulder and then form as the yellow scuba top and pink shorts of his human target.
• Shoot the Television: A variant where the televised program is someone's memories. After escaping the Skrulls' mind-reading machine and fighting her captors, Carol's attention is drawn to the still-working display showing her memory of a smug Air Force jock saying, "You do know why it's called a cockpit, right?" She blasts the screen before leaving the room.
• Showing Up Chauvinists: Implied to the case in Carol's flashbacks with her being taunted by males whenever she seemed to fail at something while growing up (Go-Kart, Baseball, Military Training, etc). Once she managed to get her memories back, we see her getting back up in each of the memories despite the taunts, ready to try again and indeed comes into play when she confronts Yon-Rogg and he tries to get her to fight him to prove to him she the better fighter in a callback to the start of the movie when he was training her and beat her easily. She just simply blast him instead. Considering she was indeed a jet pilot back before the accident, it's very clear she proved her male jeerers wrong.
• Shown Their Work: After escaping in the Quinjet, Carol asks how to get to Louisiana. Fury replies "Due East, hang a right at Memphis." Los Angeles and Memphis are almost on the same latitude degree and New Orleans is exactly 90 degrees to the south.
• Shut Up, Hannibal!: At the climax, Yon-Rogg tries to goad Carol into Let's Fight Like Gentlemen. She cuts him off mid-rant by blowing him into a mountain of rubble with an energy blast.
• Sigil Spam: When she gets a hat with the S.H.I.E.L.D. logo, Carol calls out S.H.I.E.L.D.'s tendency to put their logo on everything.
  Carol Danvers: Does announcing your identity on clothing help with the covert part of your job?
• Significant Double Casting: Invoked by the Supreme Intelligence which takes the form of whomever you admire the most. Thus, Annette Bening plays both the most positive and most negative influences on Carol's life.
• Signs of Disrepair: The name the Kree gave Carol Danvers, "Vers", comes from her broken dogtag — Maria has the rest of it.
• Silicon-Based Life: The Skrulls are not carbon-based, according to the S.H.I.E.L.D. examiner who performs an autopsy on one.
• Single Tear: A tear runs down Carol's cheek when she exclaims "My name is Carol!" after the Supreme Intelligence keeps calling her "Vers" in the climax.
• Snark-to-Snark Combat: This movie doesn't stray from the MCU being a World of Snark. And when Carol, whom Korath complains about being too much of a jokester, and Nick Fury, who in the other movies is a certified smartass, get together, the barbs fly with ease.
  Fury: You look like someone's disgruntled niece. Put this on.
  Carol: [looking confused at S.H.I.E.L.D. hat] What's this?
  Fury: It's the S.H.I.E.L.D. logo.
  Carol: Does announcing your identity on clothing help with the covert part of your job?
  Fury: Says the space soldier who was wearing a rubber suit.
• Sole Entertainment Option: The Skrull refugees' only form of entertainment is an antique pinball machine. One child is very proud of having the current high score.
• Something Only They Would Say: This is the only way to figure out if someone is being impersonated by a Skrull, as they only retain a stolen identity's most recent memories.
  • Starforce members identify themselves by code numbers when they meet up, since only they will know their given codes. This backfires when Talos captures and kills the Kree spy Soh-Larr, learns Soh-Larr's codes, and then impersonates him to lure Starforce to Torfa and kidnap Carol. Later, when Yon-Rogg finds Carol on Earth, he questions her instead, recognizing that the codes didn't work before.
  • Fury figures out Talos has impersonated his boss when he calls him "Nicholas", after Fury had earlier established to Carol that nobody — not even his mother — would call him anything other than "Fury". This gets a call-back when a Kree soldier appears to be taking Fury, Maria and Skrull prisoners to be ejected out an airlock. Leaning in to Fury, the Kree says "Just go with it... like Havana." Fury realizes this is actually Talos using Fury's own Bluff the Imposter move from earlier to reveal himself.
• So Proud of You: Yon-Rogg tells Carol this at the end to get her to drop her guard. It fails horribly — and hilariously.
• Space Plane: The Quadjet can fly into space after Skrull technology is incorporated into it.
• Spare a Messenger: The only reason Yon-Rogg survives the movie is because Carol needs someone to send back to Hala with a message for the Supreme Intelligence that Carol is coming for it.
• Special Edition Title: As this is the first Marvel Cinematic Universe film released after Stan Lee's death, the Marvel logo, usually showing characters from the MCU, instead features images of Lee's cameos and publicity images and is followed by a message: "Thank you, Stan."
• Spot the Imposter: Where the Imposter Forgot One Detail. Obviously, with the Skrulls around, this comes up a lot.
  • In the opening, Minn-Erva is aiming at some refugees when Att-Lass comes up to tell her they're not a threat. When Minn-Erva sees the real Att-Lass down on the ground, she realizes she's dealing with a Skrull.
  • Fury and Coulson are chasing Carol who's on a train chasing a Skrull. Fury doesn't believe in this crazy lady's story... until Coulson suddenly calls him from the site of the Blockbuster store, wondering where Fury went. Cue "Coulson" attacking Fury.
  • Fury makes it clear that everyone, even his own mother, only calls him by his last name. So when Keller calls him "Nicholas", he knows something's up. He then tells Keller about "doing a pincer move like in Havana." When Keller agrees to this mission that never happened, Fury knows he's a disguised Skrull.
  • Yon-Rogg meets with Carol as they start questioning each other to see who's a Skrull. Carol is correct in that Yon-Rogg never tells anyone who the Supreme Intelligence appears to him as. But Yon-Rogg asks who gave Carol her blue blood transfusion on Hala, and her pause makes him realize this is a Skrull distracting him from the real Carol. In this case, however, Carol actually gave her impostor the correct answers, so either she didn't realize Yon-Rogg would get so detailed, or the poor guy blanked under pressure.
• Spotting the Thread:
  • After lecturing Carol that everyone calls him Fury, and absolutely no-one calls him anything else (yes, that includes his own mother), Fury is on high alert when his boss calls him "Nicholas". Since Fury already had established in the same conversation with Carol that he only goes on missions in places that start of the letter B, he quizzes his boss by talking about doing a pincer move, "like we did in Havana." Talos' failure to correct him on that is the final straw.
    Talos: Was it something I said?
  • Carol is also able to track another Skrull onto a train when they assume the form of an old woman... whom Carol had run into by accident getting off of the train just before getting on the train herself.
  • A double-whammy when Yon-Rogg confronts Carol near the end of the movie: "Carol" answers his questions perfectly until he presses for more detail and "she" slips up. This both clues him in to "Carol" being a Skrull, and to "Vers" having turned on him.
• Stealth Hi/Bye: In the mid-credits Stinger, Carol is suddenly right behind Black Widow without ever having made a sound, or any of the other Avengers seeing her come in.
• Stealth in Space: Kree Imperial Cruisers come equipped with a cloaking device that renders them completely invisible. Mar-Vell's Laboratory is such a ship, and it spends several years parked in Earth orbit without anyone being the wiser.
• The Stinger: Two. One in the middle of the credits, and one after the credits are over.
  • The first one is directly connected to Avengers: Endgame. The surviving Avengers are mourning the casualties caused by Thanos's universe-thinning Snap. They then turn their attention to the modified pager that Fury left behind, which suddenly turns off. As they are contemplating how to turn it back on, Carol suddenly appears behind them and asks where Fury is.
  • The second one is Goose jumping on Fury's desk in his office before coughing out the Tesseract.
• The Stoic: Almost nothing can upset Carol's equilibrium. She maintains her cool throughout the movie, reacting to all but the greatest crisis with only the smallest of gestures and keeping her focused expression. Lampshaded when an unsympathetic bystander complains about how she ought to smile more. In retaliation, she steals his bike. Justified, as Carol's a trained fighter pilot; the ability to keep a cool head in messy situations would have been drilled into her, something that isn't easy to shake off, even in the face of Kree brainwashing. Kree training also seems to emphasize emotional control, see Not So Stoic.
• Stomach of Holding: Goose the Flerken can swallow things a lot bigger than she is, including several Kree soldiers in one gulp. She also acts as Phlebotinum-Handling Equipment after she swallows the Tesseract.
• Story-Breaker Power: Perinvoked Word of God, Captain Marvel is the most powerful hero in the universe. This ends up being why it takes until the end of Avengers: Infinity War, when Nick Fury's back-up plan fails, for Fury to call upon her help — with her power, the conflicts of the other movies would be over way too quickly. From a narrative standpoint, she is imbued with power from the explosion of an engine created for FTL Travel reverse engineered from the Tesseract itself. This gives her the ability to conduct photon blasts from her body, which itself allows her super strength, flight (and faster-than-light speed), along with no indication that she ever needs to recharge her powers.
• Stripping the Scarecrow: Realizing how much her uniform stands out on Earth, Carol steals some local clothing from a store mannequin.
• Stylistic Suck: The movie's webpage is deliberately made in the style of '90s websites. Complete with Comic Sans, among others, along with garish backgrounds, cheap-looking gifs and a MIDI version of the main theme (only if you turn it on, though).
• Subspace Ansible: Vers finds it fairly easy to modify Earth phones and pagers to let her communicate with people in other galaxies.
• Superdickery: An early trailer briefly shows Carol seemingly punching an old woman without any context. Turns out that the old woman was actually a Skrull... not that Carol took the time to explain that to any of the other passengers, who intervene to stop Carol from beating up a seemingly helpless old lady. Even as the old lady is acrobatically spinning, jumping and kicking Carol while also subverted by the fact the old lady is really a Hero Antagonist.
• Super Hero Origin: The story starts In Medias Res and shows Carol's origin as a superhero largely through Flashbacks — she is an Amnesiac Hero trying to discover her past.
• Superman Stays Out of Gotham: The movie provides an explanation for why Carol isn't around to help with previous Earth crises. She is busy helping the Skrulls and fighting the Kree Empire. She gives a pager to Fury but warns him to call her "for emergencies only." This is the main reason Fury feels the need for the Avengers Initiative.
• Sure, Let's Go with That: Coulson asks if Fury lost his eye to Kree torture for refusing to give up the Tesseract. Fury neither confirms nor denies it, especially since the real reason he lost use of it is rather... mundane.
• Suspiciously Apropos Music: When Carol communes with the Supreme Intelligence after remembering her real identity, the Supreme Intelligence is dancing to Nirvana's "Come as You Are", which she pulled from Carol's head and includes the lyrics... "Come as you are, as you were | As I want you to be | As a friend, as a friend | As a known enemy".
• Swallowed Whole: The Flerken species can swallow pretty much anything. Goose devours a squad of Kree and the Tesseract, the latter of which she eventually coughs back up.
• Take a Moment to Catch Your Death: Subverted when Talos gets shot right as the door is closing on his escape spaceship, but he ultimately survives his wounds.
• Take Me Instead: As Yon-Rogg arrives to round up (if not even exterminate) the Skrulls cowering in fear, their general Talos steps forward and defends them.
  Talos: Let them go! You can have me.
• Take That!:
  • Carol crashlanding in a Blockbuster Video near the film's beginning can be seen as a swipe at Blockbuster for the infamous Humiliation Conga it suffered through over the Turn of the Millennium leading up to its eventual bankruptcy. Relatedly, several critics have taken Carol vaporizing the True Lies cardboard cutout within the Blockbuster as a subtle swipe at the many problems associated with that film.
• Teeth-Clenched Teamwork: Though two of these examples eventually develop into Fire-Forged Friends.
  • Pretty much anyone Carol teams up with over the course of the film undergoes this with her, but she warms up to them all eventually, and they to her.
  • Fury has this dynamic with Talos, and he bluntly warns the person in question that their alliance is tenuous at best. He loosens up after meeting with Talos's family and people and Talos himself engineering their escape from the Kree. When Talos gets shot, Fury takes his hand and even calls him "friend." However, he does not want him posing as his boss.
• That Man Is Dead: Used to awesome effect when Carol fights back against the Supreme Intelligence, who keeps referring to her by her Kree name of "Vers".
  Carol Danvers: My name... is Carol.
• There Is No Kill Like Overkill: The Accusers are all about this trope, as their predilection for solving every problem by liberal use of Orbital Bombardment clearly shows.
• This Was His True Form: When a Skrull impersonating someone is killed, they revert to their natural form.
• Thrown Out the Airlock:
  • Vers is able to free herself from the shackles preventing her from using her photon blasts while fighting the Skrulls aboard their ship. In doing so, she blows a large hole through the ship's hull, which spaces a lot of her captors and nearly Vers as well.
  • Yon-Rogg's forces overwhelm the heroes aboard Mar-Vell's ship, and they intend to bring Goose with them while throwing everyone else (Maria, Fury, and the Skrulls) out of the airlock.
• Timeshifted Actor: Mckenna Grace and London Fuller play a younger Carol in flashbacks.
• Title In: The film uses place labels, followed by a blurb and some coordinates, to introduce viewers to a new location. Earth is called "C-53" with the subtitle "Terran Homeworld".
• Token Heroic Orc: Though it takes a while before it's made clear, as of the movie's release, Mar-Vell is one of exactly two Kree presented in the entire MCU who is capable of empathizing with members of other races, and spent the last years of her life trying to give the Skrull refugees a home.
• Tomato in the Mirror: Vers isn't a Kree soldier; she's an Earth native infused with powers from the Tesseract. In fact, she was a pilot named Carol Danvers with a family. Carol does not react well when she recalls the day Wendy died and Yon-Rogg kidnapped her
• Too Spicy for Yog-Sothoth: Played for Laughs when Goose swallows the Tesseract whole, only to cough it up like a hairball later.
• Touched by Vorlons: Zig-zagged. Vers believes she's a Kree and has blue Kree blood, and she's told that she was given photon abilities by the Kree. She later learns that her powers are derived from the Tesseract and are entirely her own. However, Carol really does have Kree blood running through her system, since Yon-Rogg donated his blood to save her life.
• Tragic Keepsake: Maria kept a piece of Carol's dog tag, which was apparently the only thing that survived the crash that killed Carol and her mentor.
• Traintop Battle: Carol fights a Skrull on top of a moving LA Metro Rail Blue line train.
• Translator Microbes: As in Guardians of the Galaxy (2014), this is Handwaved when Carol mentions her universal translator the first time she talks to a human, and the fact that Kree have Earth in their records helps justify that. Presumably, the Kree are really speaking their own alien language when among themselves, like with Ronan in Guardians. Skrulls have no problems talking to humans, which may be justified by Mar-Vell harboring the Skrulls and preparing them for asylum on Earth for a pretty long time.
• Trespassing to Talk: Talos sneaks into Maria's house and reveals himself after Carol mistakes neighbor Tom for Talos. Carol and Fury are ready to shoot him, but he puts his hands up, saying he only wants to talk and further indicating he's being truthful by coming to them in his natural form.
• Tron Lines: While experimenting with the suit's ability to change colors, Monica briefly gives Carol multicolored glowing lines. Which inspires a "No. Just… No" Reaction for the both of them... despite it looking awesome.
• Twofer Token Minority: Carol's wise best friend as a human, Maria Rambeau (played by Lashana Lynch), is a female black US Air Force fighter pilot as well as a strong working single mother.
• Two Girls to a Team: The Kree Starforce has Vers and Minn-Erva, while the other four members are men.
• Uncertain Doom: It is unknown if Talos and his family, other Skrull refugees, Yon-Rogg, the Kree Starforce, Keller (though he left S.H.I.E.L.D. a long time ago), or the Rambeaus are still alive after Thanos's Snap.
• The Unreveal: Near the beginning of the film, Carol and Yon-Rogg emphasize how no-one has seen the true form of the Supreme Intelligence. By the end of the film, that's still the case (probably because it would be tough to show this in live-action and not have it look silly).
• Unusually Uninteresting Sight: Aboard a train, Carol punches a Skrull disguised as an old lady. Other passengers grab and restrain Carol to stop her from beating what appears to be a helpless old woman, having failed to notice that the "old woman" is growling, spin-kicking, and putting up a really good fight for someone her age.
• Viewer-Friendly Interface:
  • The movie makes it apparent that our heroes are waiting for an audio CD to load by having the computer display a slow progress bar; this doesn't usually happen for audio CDs.
  • The Windows 95 CD Player in the movie shows a waveform of the black box recording where a time counter would be in the real program.
• Villain: Exit, Stage Left: Ronan sees Carol destroy all of his missiles, the fighters deployed to kill her, and one of the big ships. Then as she's prepared to attack Ronan's ship too, he orders a retreat but hopes to come back for her someday.
• Villainous Valor: Despite clearly being hopelessly out of their league, the members of Starforce still put up an impressive fight against Carol.
• Vocal Dissonance: While taking the form of a surfer girl, Talos talks to his allies in his usual guttural voice.
• Voices Are Not Mental: Played with: Skrulls are able to assume the forms of their targets down to the DNA level. However, they may choose to use their original voices when there's nobody around to fool. Talos, disguised as Director Keller, speaks with the latter's American accent, but once he knows his disguise is blown and there's no-one else around to hear him, he speaks to Fury with his normal accent.
• War Is Hell: This is the basis for Talos's rationale for so easily forgiving Carol for her part in the extermination of Skrulls. War brings out the worst in people and it can lead them to commit terrible actions. He also saw her horrified admission that she never knew. Talos admits that his own hands are also dirty from the war; his cause is simply the survival of his people rather than galactic domination like the Kree, but not everybody he's killed or tried to kill has been a Kree zealot.
• War Refugees: The Skrulls. They're essentially suffering through a genocide and are now refugees struggling to survive.
• Well-Intentioned Extremist: Talos. It turns out he's trying to find his family and some other survivors, which is admirable, but even if you can take his word for it that the Skrull-terrorist is all propaganda spread by the Kree, he still ordered to have Fury killed while in disguise, just because Fury started working with Carol in earnest. He also admits that his hands are filthy with the war.
• Wham Shot:
  • Vers examines a file with Wendy Lawson's name. She does a Double Take when, while browsing the pages, she sees a photo of her with the name "Carol Danvers," confirming she's from Earth and isn't a Kree. Vers is especially disturbed when she flashes back to encountering Wendy and her cat Goose.
  • As Carol remembers (thanks to a black box recording) what really happened when Lawson's ship crashes, we see Lawson shot down, her attacker slowly coming forward... but instead of a Skrull, it's Yon-Rogg. A viewer might be able to tell something is off about this scene even earlier, as Carol's nosebleed is red, instead of blue like in her memories at the start of the film, which hints that the first version was a lie.
  • Aboard Lawson's space vessel, Carol and company enter the ship's core room, and we see what is powering it: the Tesseract.
  • Two-fer within the same scene: Black Widow, Steve Rogers, Bruce Banner, and James Rhodes appear in the mid-credits Stinger and are a surprising sight due to the scarce plot details given in Endgame's marketing. Carol then appears behind them, as it's revealed she survived the snap and was able to sneak up on them without any of them noticing.
• What Beautiful Eyes!:
  • The more we see of the Skrulls' sympathetic motives, the more the camera focuses on their wide, dark, expressive eyes, subtly enforcing this on the viewer's perspective.
  • At the end, when the Skrull refugees are considering living as humans on Earth, Talos mentions that he liked wearing Director Keller's "pretty blue eyes". Monica Rambeau replies that she likes the Skrulls' eyes as they are, and asks Talos's daughter G'iah to never change hers.
• What Happened to the Mouse?:
  • Most of Yon-Rogg's team vanish after the climax, having been left on Mar-Vell's space station. Yon-Rogg himself was sent back to Hala and Minn-Erva was shot down by Maria, but the fate of the rest is unclear. At least we know Korath was Saved by Canon.
  • The real S.H.I.E.L.D. director, Keller, whom Talos assumed the identity of, never shows up again for the rest of the movie. Talos claims that he was just knocked out, but he's not mentioned again otherwise.
  • Soh-Larr, the Kree spy on Torfa, never actually appears. The one time he seems to, it's actually Talos impersonating him to ambush and capture Carol.
  • Four Skrulls make it to Earth and arrive on the beach: Talos, Norex (the "science guy"), and two others. We know the fates of Talos, Norex, and the Skrull who impersonated Coulson, but the fourth one (the one who attacked Carol and then gave her the slip on the train) never appears again.
  • Carol's mentioned as having essentially cut her birth family out of her life due to her father's sexism, with Maria & Monica Lambeau being her Family of Choice. However, some details in her flashbacks indicate she had a much better relationship with her older brother Steven, with him even shown to be standing up for Carol in some of the flashbacks against their father. However, Steven Danvers himself never appears nor is mentioned by anyone outside of these flashbacks. What makes it noteworthy is that even after regaining her memory, Carol never goes looking for him or even mentions him (which admittedly might be due to the huge Race Against the Clock that all of the characters are striving against for most of the film).
• What Measure Is a Non-Cute?: Done quite cleverly. Even a viewer who knows nothing about the villainous role the Skrulls have played in the comics for years would naturally assume that the scary-looking, Orc-like, shapeshifting aliens who dress in black are the bad guys, which makes it a genuine shock to learn that it's actually the Kree.
• What the Hell, Hero?:
  • Fury acts as The Conscience towards Carol, who appears on Earth and admonishes her after her having crashed into a Blockbuster and raided a Radio Shack for communication parts. He even tries to arrest her on charges of property damage and burglary at first.
  • Carol criticizes Fury calling for backup without telling her, since it leads the Skrulls to them. She confiscates his pager, only to upgrade it and return it at the end of the film, so that he can call her in case of emergency.
  • In-Universe: Regular citizens understandably try to stop Carol from punching out the lights of what they think is just an old woman (who is really a Skrull in disguise).
• When All You Have Is a Hammer…: Yon-Rogg dislikes how the Accusers like to subject planets to Orbital Bombardment. He refuses to allow Ronan to carpet-bomb the Earth, telling him there are more discreet solutions.
• Wild Card: Lampshaded by Fury when Goose switches allegiance by refusing to eat the Kree about to capture Fury and Maria. She recognizes that the Kree is actually a disguised Talos.
  Fury: Damn it, Goose! Pick a side!
• "Will Return" Caption: After the first stinger, the screen displays: "Captain Marvel will return in Avengers: Endgame."
• With My Hands Tied: Carol gets captured early on and ends up with huge metal restraints on her hands that she can't just photon-blast off... so she starts pummeling the Skrulls with them.
• Working Out Their Emotions: Carol Danvers is introduced in the midst of a nightmare related to her Identity Amnesia, leading her to collect her mentor Yon-Rogg for some late-night sparring practice. His reaction suggests this is a regular occurrence.
• The World Is Just Awesome: At the end of the movie, before flying off into space with the Skrulls, Carol takes a moment to admire Earth from the orbit.
• Wound That Will Not Heal: Played for laughs. Nick Fury's lost eye is a result of Goose the Flerken scratching him, and evidently Flerken scratches don't heal up.
• Wrong Side All Along: It's revealed late in the movie that the Skrulls are actually refugees being hunted to extinction by the genocidal, imperialistic Kree, and that Carol and her human allies have been duped into supporting space Nazis. All the violent and seemingly evil actions of the Skrulls were just a bunch of Well-Intentioned Extremists trying to protect themselves.
• Xenafication: Not really Carol herself, who is a superheroine in the comics too. However, it's played straight with:
  • Maria Rambeau, who was a peaceful seamstress in the comics. In the film, she's a badass female black fighter pilot.
  • Minn-Erva, the Kree woman. In the comics, she was a scientist, and even an anti-war advocate originally, and while she did get into fights occasionally, that was not really her thing. For the movie, she is apparently a career military Action Girl.
• You Go, Girl!: Carol and her friend Maria fight against the sexism and condescension of '80s America and the military. The old boys think Carol isn't good enough, because she's a woman, but over the course of the movie she proves that she is a better pilot (and greater hero) than any of them.
• You're Nothing Without Your Phlebotinum: Yon-Rogg tries to goad Carol into proving that she can fight him hand-to-hand without her "light show". She dismissively blasts him mid-rant, telling him she doesn't need to prove herself to him.

---

"Where's Fury?"

---