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Brie Larson smashes it in the Captain Marvel trailer but not everyone’s happy

Cool: The Captain Marvel trailer has the first look at its star's helmet, made famous in comic books.

Cool: The Captain Marvel trailer has the first look at its star's helmet, made famous in comic books. Photo: Twitter

Captain Marvel’s trailer has dropped, and it shows Brie Larson literally smashing it – bashing an old lady and crashing heavily to Earth.

Oscar winner Larson, 28, is the first female to lead a standalone film for the Marvel Comic Universe.

The long-awaited teaser is loaded with existing Marvel characters and throwbacks to the finest in 1990s nostalgia: video stores, pagers, flannelette shirts and retro bus terminals.

The clip opens with Larson’s Carol Danvers/Captain Marvel falling from space into a Blockbuster outlet.

The clip quickly took Twitter by storm. But fans were divided, with Larson’s roundhouse on a pensioner creating some angst.

“Yeah, March can’t come soon enough so the film can explain this,” wrote one user.

Said another, “All I can think about is when #CaptainMarvel punches that old woman in the face and how much faith that trailer has in its fans to know ‘she’s right to do this’ and I love everything about that.”

Marvel tweeted about the moment later: “There may be more going on here than what is seen at first glance.” Sure.

Fisticuffs aside, the rest of the trailer also divided fans, with one calling the clip “severely underwhelming” but another noting, “God is a woman.”

According to the synopsis, the half-human, half-alien heroine gets embroiled in an intergalactic war between two alien species in the ’90s.

Danvers seems to have no solid recollection of her previous time on Earth as a pilot for the US air force, and the trailer shows flashes of her upbringing and military training.

“I keep having these memories. I see flashes. I think I have a life here,” she says. “But I can’t tell if it’s real.”

Along the way, Danvers – who already has her superpowers – meets Samuel L. Jackson as a younger Sergeant Nick Fury and Clark Gregg as S.H.I.E.L.D’s Agent Phil Coulson.

Jude Law debuts in the Marvel world as Danvers’ mentor, and they team up against villains Ronan (Lee Pace, first introduced in Guardians of the Galaxy) and Korath (Djimon Hounsou.)

According to Wired, the teaser is “nearly too full” of Clinton-era sight gags and pop culture nods.

“So many ’90s signifiers are crammed into the not-quite-two-minute trailer that you’d be forgiven for thinking Marvel’s plan to defeat the Skrulls was to pummel them with references.

“If the movie becomes a game of reference-spotting Whack-a-Mole, it’ll get old fast.”

As co-director Anna Boden told Entertainment Weekly, “The ’90s doesn’t feel that long ago to us because we’re really old.

“But doing this movie has really made us realise how out-of-date so much stuff from the ‘90s actually is, and we’ve been having a lot of fun with that.”

According to theories, Captain Marvel is mired in the ’90s because it needs an origin story, and the mid-20th century has already been snapped up by the likes of Steve Rogers/Captain America and Tony Stark’s father.

The Cold War is locked down by Wonder Woman at DC, so in terms of continuity, “the best place to put Carol Danvers is in the grunge era,” said Wired.

Thought the nostalgia was cheesy? Captain Marvel is due for US release on International Women’s Day: March 8, 2019.

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