Since back at 2017’s Marvel Studios panel at San Diego Comic-Con about its first woman-led Marvel Cinematic Universe story, “Captain Marvel,” we’ve known the movie will include some of Marvel Comics’ worst bad guys: a group of dangerous, powerful and ruthless green aliens known as the Skrulls.
If you’re not up on your Marvel Comics, though, you could be forgiven for not knowing who or what a Skrull is. Obviously, we’ve seen aliens in Marvel’s cinematic universe before: The Chitauri, who invaded New York with Loki (Tom Hiddleston) in “The Avengers”; and the Kree, blue-skinned aliens who include the genocidal fanatic Ronan The Accuser (Lee Pace), main villain in “Guardians of the Galaxy.”
The Skrulls predate both of those races in the Marvel Universe, facing off against lots of Marvel heroes over the years. And they’ve shown up on plenty of other Marvel productions, like various “Fantastic Four” cartoons, and the 1990s “X-Men” cartoon. But “Captain Marvel” marks their debut as part of the MCU. So what’s their deal?
Created by Jack Kirby and Stan Lee in 1962, the Skrulls are almost as old as the Marvel Universe itself. They first appeared in “Fantastic Four” #2 – and the Marvel Universe only began with “Fantastic Four” #1 in December, 1961 (Older characters like Namor and Captain America, who debuted in Marvel’s earlier incarnation, Timely Comics, were later imported into Marvel.)
The Skrulls are a bit like the Kree in that they have an interstellar empire, located in the Andromeda galaxy. They’re a race of basically human-looking folks, except they have green skin and pointy ears. Thanks to some new photos from “Captain Marvel” published by Entertainment Weekly, we’ve finally gotten our first look at the Skrulls, who we know are showing up on Earth to do some damage.
Did no one tell them that summer is over? How embarrassing. #CaptainMarvel https://t.co/J6kIycq1oP pic.twitter.com/hO07Jjs3A2
— Samantha Highfill (@samhighfill) September 5, 2018
The thing that makes Skrulls especially spooky is their ability to change their shapes. They can morph themselves into just about anything that’s roughly the same volume as their bodies (they can get a little smaller or a little bigger than they naturally are), and they use that ability to infiltrate and eventually subjugate other species. In the movie, the leader of the Skrulls, Talos, is played by Ben Mendelsohn, who infiltrates S.H.I.E.L.D. in his human form.
In the Marvel Comics backstory, long ago the Skrulls were experimented on by the Celestials, a race of super-smart and super-powerful aliens who’ve been around for millennia. (Kurt Russell’s Ego of “Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2” is one such Celestial.) In their experiments on the Skrulls, the Celestials created three groups — one with extreme longevity, one with latent genetic enhancements that would come to fruition as the species aged, and one with extreme genetic diversity. The last group, the “Deviants,” overtook the rest of the species and eliminated the other groups. They’re the unstable shapeshifting guys.
Over the last few million years, the Skrulls have spread through their galaxy with the help of space travel technology, dominating hundreds of other worlds and bringing them into their empire. They’ve also figured out how to genetically modify some of their people.
While even average Skrulls can just change shape and mimic other creatures or objects, most of them can’t take on those other creatures’ properties. Put another way: If a joe sixpack Skrull shapeshifts to look like Spider-Man, that Skrull won’t have Spider-Man’s powers — he’ll just be a Skrull who looks like Spider-Man. But the empire is able to create Warrior Skrulls, or Super-Skrulls, that do have the ability to take on someone else’s powers. That makes them pretty dangerous.
With the Skrulls popping up in “Captain Marvel” and shapeshifting to infiltrate S.H.I.E.L.D., it seems likely that a story of a secret aliens invasion of Earth could be in the offing. From the sounds of things, Carol Danvers is already superpowered member of the space military team Starforce at the start of the movie, so a Skrull invasion would be a good reason to bring her back home. Samuel L. Jackson’s Nick Fury is in the movie as well, and rooting out Skrulls hidden in S.H.I.E.L.D. sounds a lot like what he’s good at, as seen in “Captain America: Winter Soldier.” (It also makes for a nice callback to the end of “Iron Man,” when Fury told Tony Stark “Think you’re the only superhero in the world?”)
The Skrulls also have a long history of war with the Kree, and Marvel Studios President Kevin Feige mentioned at Comic-Con that there are lots of comics dealing with the Kree-Skrull war that the movies haven’t tapped yet. So it seems that “Captain Marvel” might be contending with even more of the larger Marvel universe than we’ve ever seen before.