Hardcore Star Trek fans despised 2013’s Star Trek Into Darkness. They hated how director J.J. Abrams reworked major themes and reintroduced bad guys from 1982’s Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, the franchise’s crown jewel, making them less clever and resonant in the process. (Plus, Trekkers were rightly annoyed that Abrams swore up and down for months that Into Darkness’s bad guy, played by Benedict Cumberbatch, wouldn’t be revealed to be Khan, when in fact he was.)

I’m a lifelong fan of these films, but I’m clearly not a bona fide Trekker since I actually didn’t mind Into Darkness’s supposed sacrilege. Rebooting the franchise with 2009’s Star Trek, Abrams blithely deviated from the original story’s timeline and lore so he could make adjustments, and while neither of his movies can hold a candle to Star Trek II or Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, the willingness to tinker made them unpredictable and intriguing. It also made them wildly uneven and more than a bit smug, but I appreciated the ambition.

Trekkers will probably be much happier with Star Trek Beyond, which is the first installment to feature director Justin Lin (who helmed four Fast and Furious movies). Faithful, exciting, grounded in character, and philosophically inclined, this new film is easily the most solid and consistently entertaining of the new movies. It is sturdy, even if it is only rarely thrilling or daring.

However, one definite advantage it has over its two predecessors is that, at this stage of the reboot, there’s no longer a need to establish these slightly altered characters or fuss over their emotional arcs. Oh, sure, Star Trek Beyond gestures toward internal dramas. Will Kirk (Chris Pine) give up his command of the Enterprise for a cushy promotion? Can Spock (Zachary Quinto) and Uhura (Zoe Saldana) repair their foundering romantic relationship? But Lin and screenwriters Simon Pegg (who returns as Scotty) and Doug Jung don’t put much heft behind these questions, letting them be mildly suspenseful mysteries we’re pretty sure will be solved before the credits roll.

Star Trek Beyond finds the Enterprise venturing out to an uncharted nebula to help an alien named Kalara (Lydia Wilson) rescue her besieged, shipwrecked crew. Immediately, Kirk and his team are attacked—not by a single ship but by a hornet’s nest of small vessels that assault the Enterprise on all sides. In many regards, Star Trek Beyond is a pretty familiar Trek tale, but this early battle sequence is one of the franchise’s most inspired, our heroes’ vessel being torn to shreds by a swarm of enemy ships too tiny for its weapons to hit.