Nick Fury’s super-spy trick to escape the base at Project Pegasus in Captain Marvel should have been familiar to fans of Ant-Man. Set in 1995, the MCU prequel sees a younger and less mysterious Fury than audiences are used to. Two-eyed and incredibly fond of cats (two character traits that are reversed in a quick scratch), he’s yet to become Director of S.H.I.E.L.D. or conceive of the Avengers Initiative (nee Protector).
But that doesn’t mean he’s inexperienced. As he tells Starforce warrior hero Vers during their first proper conversation, he was in the army and worked espionage in the Cold War. He gets to show off a lot of the skills he learned there throughout the movie, including a rather-McGyver trick when locked up in the Project Pegasus base; Fury uses sellotape to pull a fingerprint off a security badge and use it to bypass a biometrics reader and escape. Not as quick as Carol’s photon blasts, but it’s certainly impressive.
Although perhaps not as impressive as Scott Lang’s version of the trick. In 2015’s Ant-Man, when breaking into Hank Pym’s vault, the ex-con gets past a fingerprint scanner in a similar, albeit more complex manner than Fury did 20 canonical years earlier; he too pulls a print from Hank’s home, but then constructs a proper replica by melting and forming glue in a ring.
Taking fingerprints using adhesive tape is a well-known trick (there are many online videos about how to take advantage of it to “hack” into a smartphone") regarded as spy-like, so it’s hardly surprising to see it referenced in the espionage-focused MCU. What is surprising, though, is for two movies in the same franchise four years apart to both use it as a way to show their hero’s intelligence and adaptability. Indeed, there’s no indication of any connection between the two, either in-universe - Scott Lang and Nick Fury are yet to cross paths in the MCU - nor does Captain Marvel have a wink that audiences should have seen this before.
While nothing about the shared Fury and Lang trick breaks MCU canon, it’s an odd rhymic choice in the connected shared universe that feels a little repetitive. Considering how Captain Marvel ends with Carol defeating Yon-Rogg in a moment evocative of The Avengers’ “Puny God” moment (albeit with stronger thematic reasoning), it risks leaving the movie feeling derivative (at least to obsessive MCU fans who can recall every plot beat). Of course, the truth is the opposite; Marvel always prioritizes the movie at hand, meaning this must be written off as something of a coincidence, with Captain Marvel directors Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck wanting the moment (so as to set up the Carol photon blast joke).
In the end, what Captain Marvel’s unaware echoing of Ant-Man really does is provide fuel for an unexpected fan debate: considering the greater complexity of his fingerprint method, is Scott Lang a better infiltrator than Nick Fury?
