A test pilot who wakes up on an alien world with someone else's name, someone else's war, and no memory of the life that was taken from her.
Carol Danvers spends most of her own film being told what she is. She is Vers, a Kree soldier with a short memory, a commander who trains her to control her abilities and an artificial intelligence that keeps telling her to control her feelings. The film is structured so that the audience learns the truth roughly when she does, which is why it plays quite differently the second time.
What she actually is, is the pilot who was in the room when a light-speed engine went wrong, and who absorbed the energy of the Tesseract instead of dying. Yon-Rogg took her to Hala, transfused his own blood into her, and she came out of it a human-Kree hybrid called Vers, with the power described to her as borrowed and revocable.
Because her film is set in 1995, she is also the point where the timeline folds. She is the one who gives Nick Fury the idea, and the reason there is a pager on his belt in 2018 with one number in it.
Show detailsWhy the Avengers are called the Avengers
Fury meets Danvers on Earth in 1995, and it is her activities that year and her call sign, “Avenger”, that give him the name for the initiative. The whole team is named after a person none of its members had met.
It is worth noting where this differs from the comics, because it is a real divergence rather than a detail. There, the Avengers form in response to Loki and are named by the Wasp.
Major spoiler
The Skrulls are refugees, not invaders, and she ends the film helping them look for somewhere to live. The Kree are the aggressors, the training was there to keep her working at a fraction of her strength, and she beats Yon-Rogg without using any of it before sending him home with a message for the Supreme Intelligence.