Captain Marvel comes out in almost 1 month and as seen in the marketing material, the film really has a lot to explain in its slated run time of 2 hours and 10 minutes. There’s the whole Kree story arc, the motivation of the Skrulls, Nick Fury’s involvement in the story and many more things are a part of this complex story. This is the ultimate MCU prequel as we have seen 19 movies that supposedly lie after this film, so it could turn out to be a major retcon for any or all of those films.
But having the responsibility of referencing so many things, and telling a compelling story that doesn’t create any plot holes would be very difficult for this film. So if you think about it, this film is very prone to creating plot holes and continuity errors in the MCU, especially because of the fact that it takes place in 1995. There have been some MCU moments which date back to the 90s, and while this movie may not have anything to do with those aspects, we could still see some mistakes been made in the future.
Marvel always wanted to bring out a Captain Marvel movie, but it wasn’t planned way ahead during Phase 1, so that is why including Nick Fury for a key role could cause some slip ups here and there. We’ve already talked about how Nick Fury may have lied while giving out a reason to the Avengers for making Tesseract weapons. Now there comes another plausible mistake, or rather senseless dialogue from Iron Man 2, which does create a canon problem for Nick Fury in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
In Iron Man 2 we see Fury meet up with Tony Stark in order to get him on the right track since he had been acting crazy dying off of his arc reactor. Now when all of this happens, Fury tells Tony that he used to work with Howard Stark. Fury told Tony that
“He [Howard] said that you were the only person with the means and knowledge to finish what he started.” Tony then gave a bitter reply referencing his father stating, “You’re talking about a guy whose happiest day was when he shipped me off to boarding school.” Fury then told Stark that he was wrong about his father and insisted that Fury knew Howard better than Tony ever did.
This motivated Tony a lot as he checked out the old journal and videos of his father, which were stored at SHIELD till then. All this led to Tony creating a new element. But as pointed out by Screen Rant, the matter of concern here is that there is no way Fury could have really known Howard as well as he implies. We’ve seen the horrific death of Howard Stark back in 1991, and Fury shows up as a low-level Agent of SHIELD, ready to quit his job in Captain Marvel.
As we saw in the first trailer, meeting Captain Marvel gives Fury a new perspective, and probably even spawns the idea of Avengers Initiative. But all this happens in 1995, and fury is still probably a desk job agent, or at least someone with a lower level clearance. The show, Agents of SHIELD explicitly shows how there are different levels of clearances for all agents involved with SHIELD, and Fury here seems to be a Level 5 agent at max. He’s about to quit his life as a SHIELD agent as he’d probably done with it.
With Fury mentioning that he knew Howard Stark, it would mean that he was still working for SHIELD in 1991, when Howard died. So this means that Fury has been a low-level Agent with SHIELD for at least 4 years if not longer. This explains why Fury would have wanted to quit in 1995, but it doesn’t explain why a founding member of SHIELD, who probably has a clearance of Level 7 or 8, would even know someone from Level 4 or 5, let alone work with him. Fury knowing Howard very well and working with him doesn’t really make any sense.
Every MCU fan that knows about Howard Stark, wouldn’t say that Howard strikes as a person who’d make friends with a low level Agent. You could imagine that was already too busy with all the SHIELD work, so he’d really not get much time to have a social life, and be even acquainted with Fury. So, to solve this problem, we’d have to say that this was another lie that Fury told to motivate someone.
We saw it in the first Avengers movie that Fury lied about the Captain America trading cards that were in Phil Coulson’s locker. Fury told Steve and Tony that Coulson had those cards in his pocket and he died with the idea of believing in Superheroes. Later when Agent Hill asked him that why did he have to lie, so he simply said that the Avengers needed the push.
This is the only way we can explain the lie that Fury tells to Stark. The only way Fury could have really known Howard is by reading his journals and watching the videos that he had made back when he was involved with SHIELD. Fury became the director, so he had access to anything and everything and with that access, he could have gotten to know Howard Stark enough to give Tony the same motivation that he later gives to the Avengers. There can’t be any other valid explanation to all this.
Captain Marvel comes out on March 8. Let’s just hope that the film doesn’t create many big plot holes. Here’s the official Synopsis:
“The story follows Carol Danvers as she becomes one of the universe’s most powerful heroes when Earth is caught in the middle of a galactic war between two alien races. Set in the 1990s, “Captain Marvel” is an all-new adventure from a previously unseen period in the history of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.”
