BEHIND me watching this two-hour futurist fantasy actioner set somewhere within a galaxy, presumably ours, were three young men who looked as if they might be fans of films from the same conglomerate that made the film, Marvel, which has read the tea leaves about where to make big money from moving images as well as printed pages of cartoon frames. Shazam (Billy Batson’s magic word to morph him into Captain Marvel back in the day.)

As the film dug its heels into a plot about a bad guy’s ambition to rule the known galaxy by getting possession of a powerful orb, giggles from behind me developed into frequent laughter. Director and co-writer (with Nicole Perlman) James Gunn’s film is funny both ha-ha and peculiar. The ha-ha is a welcome change from most other movies in the spectacular mindless genre.

I took comfort from this. I too was laughing internally at a film that’s noisy, violent, big on design of the toys with which tyrants fight battles, low on intelligent dialogue for a second-level cast to growl, shriek or otherwise utter as they get ready for the next conflict sequence.

I can’t tell you how it all works out. About 10 minutes before the final credits, another young man just in front of me suffered an epileptic seizure, causing management to stop the film and clear the cinema. I doubt that many of a small audience felt deprived.

At all cinemas