*THE FOLLOWING POST CONTAINS SPOILERS FOR CAPTAIN MARVEL
Captain Marvel landed in theaters this past weekend and in a big bad way. The film was received well critically and judging by the numbers, audiences seem to dig it too. And why not? It’s flashy, often exciting and consistently funny. It also boasts a couple big reveals, chief among them being the Tesseract as the source of Carol Danvers’ aka Captain Marvel’s (Brie Larson) cosmic abilities.
Yes, we’re talking about the Tesseract again, the MCU’s go-to-McGuffin which was later revealed to be the Space Stone, one of five Infinity Stones that Thanos needed to snap away half of all life in the universe during the climactic finish to Avengers: Infinity War.
As much praise as Captain Marvel is getting, one of the biggest questions that seems to be on a lot of moviegoers’ minds walking out is “How did Mar-Vell (Anette Bening) get her hands on the Tesseract so that Carol and Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) were able to find it in her lab in the 1980s?”
We know, or at least we thought we knew, that the cube was in the possession of S.H.I.E.L.D. since Howard Stark fished both it and Steve Rogers, aka Captain America (Chris Evans), out of the Arctic and remained so up through when Loki (Tom Hiddleston) stole it from the agency in The Avengers. So how did it wind up in a laboratory floating around earth in the 1980s? Speaking recently to Empire, co-director Anna Boden explained the mystery:
“Our thought was that they had gotten this thing, but they didn’t know anything about it. They just kind of had it lying around somewhere at S.H.I.E.L.D., and [Mar-Vell] was able to use it to create her lightspeed engine at Pegasus. Only her as an alien would even know it had all this power, and figure out how to harness it.”
So from what it sounds like, S.H.I.E.L.D. has always had the Tesseract could not make heads or tails of it. That’s supposedly when Mar-Vell (Annette Bening) stepped into the picture and she was able to make out some sort of arrangement with the agency that allowed her to study the object with the hopes of creating vehicles capable of lightspeed travel. This raises other interesting questions, but none as glaring as the continuity gap that many fans had a problem with walking out of Captain Marvel.
What do you think of the director’s explanation for how the Tesseract ended up in Captain Marvel? Do you buy it? Or was it always a non-issue for you? Hit me up with your thoughts in the comments below!
movieminutes.net 