Captain MarvelSave

We open on planet Hala, capital of the Kree Empire — a militaristic alien civilization at war with shape-shifting refugees called the Skrulls. Vers (the woman who will be called Carol Danvers) lives in Hala's Starforce, an elite Kree military unit. She has been told she was found as an amnesiac in space six years earlier and trained as a warrior. She possesses photon-blasting energy hands and is in mentorship with Yon-Rogg, who tells her — repeatedly — that her emotions are her enemy.

On a Starforce mission to rescue an undercover Kree agent named Soh-Larr, Vers is ambushed by Skrull forces commanded by Talos (Ben Mendelsohn). The Skrulls capture her. They use a memory-extraction device on her, trying to find a specific human face buried in her subconscious. They are looking for Dr. Wendy Lawson — a human scientist Vers has fragmentary memories of. The memories reveal Vers's earlier life on Earth was as a U.S. Air Force test pilot named Carol Danvers.

Vers escapes the Skrull ship and crashes through the roof of a Blockbuster Video on Earth in 1995. The film's middle act unfolds in 1995 Los Angeles. Vers — wearing a Kree Starforce uniform — encounters a young SHIELD agent named Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson, digitally de-aged for the first time on screen). She insists she's there to hunt a Skrull infiltrator. Fury is skeptical but goes along.

Carol and Fury investigate a top-secret SHIELD facility where Dr. Wendy Lawson worked on a project called Project Pegasus. They find an engine prototype Lawson designed — running on the Tesseract's energy. They also find Goose — a tabby cat who turns out to be a Flerken, an alien creature with tentacles in its mouth. Goose becomes the film's most-quoted character and a recurring fan favorite.

Carol's memories are fragmenting back. She remembers Dr. Lawson testing the experimental Tesseract-powered engine. She remembers her crash. She remembers Dr. Lawson dying in her arms. She remembers destroying the engine to prevent it from falling into the wrong hands — which exposed her to the Tesseract energy and granted her the photon powers. The Kree captured her after that. They told her she was an amnesiac Kree soldier and trained her into Yon-Rogg's protégé for six years.

Carol turns on Yon-Rogg and the Starforce. The Kree's Supreme Intelligence — a collective consciousness — has been hiding the truth from her for six years. Carol, now fully aware of her own power, accesses the full extent of her photon-energy abilities. She is, in this awakened state, possibly the most-powerful being in the MCU. She destroys an entire Kree warship single-handedly. She defeats Yon-Rogg in front of him. 'I have nothing to prove to you.'

The film closes with Carol leaving Earth to help Talos's Skrull refugees find a new home. She gives Fury a modified pager — a device he can use to summon her in extreme emergencies. 'For emergencies only.' Fury uses the pager 23 years later, in the post-credits scene of Avengers: Infinity War (2018), moments before he disintegrates in Thanos's snap. The mid-credits scene of Captain Marvel — set in 2018 — shows the surviving Avengers staring at the pager on a SHIELD lab table. Carol arrives. 'Where's Fury?'

Captain Marvel grossed $1.128 billion globally on a $175 million budget — Marvel's first film led by a female protagonist to cross $1 billion. Critics responded mixed-to-positive, with reviewers noting strong action sequences but uneven pacing in the middle act. The film's commercial success greenlit The Marvels (2023) sequel. Brie Larson's Carol Danvers has appeared in three subsequent MCU films, including Endgame (2019).