The summer blockbuster season starts with a bang. Our heroes in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 are pursued by the Sovereign, a gilded, genetically engineered race of stuck-ups with a lot of money for bounty hunters. Thanks to the light fingers of the thieving yet endearing Rocket (voiced by Bradley Cooper), the gang is chased by a sky full of drones operated by the golden aristos with arcade-like video game controls and vintage sound effects.

Rescue comes from an omnipotent old hippie named Ego (Kurt Russell), a self-declared “small-g god.” This omnipotent beardo is the real father of “Star-Lord” Peter Quill (Chris Pratt). Ego owns a planet that looks like million-dollar van-art, with orderly little creeks and fountains. But even with his newly gotten brawn, Pratt has to do more heavy lifting as an actor than he can sometimes handle.

The dad-and-son bonding is interspersed with the continuing quarrel between space-princess Gamora (Zoe Saldana) and her evil sister, Nebula (Karen Gillan), an iridescent creature with an enameled head. As played by the improbably gigantic Dave Bautista, Drax is the funniest interstellar muscle since Adam Baldwin in Serenity. He gets the best comeback in a movie full of them when he answers Quill’s scoff “You sound like an old woman” with “Because I’m wise?” Baby Groot, the simple little sprout, is fairly adorable as he’s coached through the process of planting an atom bomb.

The sequel shares the first Guardian‘s taste for impalement, with a series of closeup reaction shots of the transfixed, as when blue-bruiser Yondu (Michael Rooker) launches a fire arrow that leaves glowing tracers as it speeds through the chests of a small army of men. Even when the victims are murderous space pirates who deserve it, there’s an unsettling amount of barbaric glee in these movies. To enjoy them, you have to accept their argument that it’s not about violence—it’s all about fireworks. Ah, summer.

‘Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2’ is playing in wide release in the North Bay.

Dash (voiced by Jason Schwartzman), the hero of the animated teen comedy My Entire High School Sinking into the Sea, is a hard-hitting reporter for the Tides High Gazette, the Xeroxed student newspaper. The Gazette‘s editor, Verti (Maya Rudolph), is trying to split up the friendship between Dash and his best pal, Assaf (Reggie Watts).

Verti, in turns out, is trying to get Assaf for herself. An upset Dash turns his attention to the new school auditorium and the apparent forged signature on the inspection permit. The place is dangerously unsound—built on a precarious cliff over the ocean and ready to collapse at the first small temblor.

When it strikes, 900 students are soon floating off to sea. Enraged by spilled blood-transfusion bags from the nurse’s office, man-eating sharks pick off the kind of kids no one can seem to remember and no one will miss. Meanwhile, Dash, Assaf, Verti and their new nodding acquaintance, Mary (voiced by Lena Dunham), make the torturous trip up to the higher levels, the inner sanctum where the seniors are cowering.

The school’s crisis produces a hero in Lunch Lady Lorraine (Susan Sarandon), a wise woman with cross-hatched hair net and a tragic back story. She bucks the kids up, nurses a jellyfish sting by boiling the stung kid’s elbow and kung-fus the school’s bullies when they try to push the bad situation into anarchy.

It’s a veritable Poseidon Adventure for a new century. The school may be wet, but director Dash Shaw’s writing style is dry, having the tang of brilliant, bored high-school-kid comedy. Tracing the outline of a disaster movie, as Shaw does, picks up the central messages of the genre: there is no such thing as a tragedy that isn’t the result of corner-cutting. Be stalwart, but be nice, the film says, and the wheel of fortune will render today’s shiniest and most important pig into tomorrow’s bacon.

‘My Entire High School Sinking into the Sea’ is screening at the Summerfield Cinemas, 551 Summerfield Road, Santa Rosa. 707.525.8909.