The Empire has fallen, but its remnants cling to power on the Outer Rim of the galaxy. The job of mopping up these remnants has been left to Republic Colonel Sigourney Weaver, and she’s gonna need all the bounty hunters and their adorable sidekicks/surrogate alien children she can find to get it done.

This is all the setup you need for The Mandalorian & Grogu, a refreshingly lighthearted space adventure that also happens to be a Star War. We meet up with Din Djarin and his little buddy on a Hoth-like planet where they have been sent to capture or kill the leader of an upstart Imperial rump state, in a Bond-esque cold open mission with gunfights, standoffs, infiltration and vehicle chases, the destruction of a couple of AT-ATs, and a last minute escape.

They return to pick up their payment at the Republic base/video game hub world where they get their missions from, and soon find themselves blasting off again, this time to “rescue” Rotta the Hutt from a gladiator ring where he’s being held captive. Rotta (Jabba’s son, the farting baby hutt from the terrible Clone Wars movie, now played by hot guy Jeremy Allen White) thinks he’s gonna be a big star after one more fight, so he doesn’t want to go, and turns our heroes in to his boss instead.

You can imagine where things go from here, and I don’t mean that with any shade. The story beats in this movie are as predictable as the ones in the western and samurai adventure movies that precede it, and the paths we take to get from beat to beat are just as fun and satisfying as they are in any of the best of them. The joy of Mandalorian and Grogu is found moment to moment, as you follow this space lone wolf and his space cub through their trials, and there are so many moments of joy to be found.

Dave Filoni and Jon Favreau have been working with these characters for the better part of a decade, and they seem to be having great fun with their opportunity to widen the scope as much as their tentpole budget will allow. We travel through jungles, cities, deserts and tundra, witness pit fighting and swordplay and shootouts and car chases and spaceship dogfights, meet weird aliens of the friendly, hostile, and toyetic varieties, and throughout all of it there’s a palpable feeling of enthusiasm radiating off of the screen, as if the filmmakers have clearly wanted a chance to put together a big-screen version of this kind of story and almost feel like they’re getting away with something. These are the kinds of guys who get a kick out of having bad-guy robots who move the same way as a Ray Harryhausen stop-motion creature, down to the limited frame rate, and they made a movie for fans who do too.

I hate to have to address the discourse around this movie, but it seems like you can’t talk about Star Wars these days without it coming up. So here we go: after the last movie in the series more than earned its terrible reputation by dipping into bone-dry creative wells trying to service fans who didn’t even know what they wanted, there was plenty of chatter to the effect that future movies in the franchise should dial down the stakes and tell more character-focused stories that don’t all revolve around the people from the original trilogy. That’s exactly what this movie is: it’s about a guy trying to take care of a kid and figuring out how to do the right thing along the way, and it’s the only Star Wars movie that doesn’t feature any characters from the OT. And the responses (from the complainier side of the Internet) have zeroed in on these qualities as a negative, whining about how the fate of the galaxy doesn’t hang in the balance and etc etc. You don’t have to like this movie (you don’t have to like any movie, as a matter of fact), but the degree of whiplash here suggests that there is also a contingent of people who just don’t want to be happy with anything.

Thankfully, those people’s opinions about the movie matter just as much as my opinion of them, which is to say, not at all.

I liked this movie quite a bit. It might not quite hit the highs of Last Jedi or Rogue One, but it’s a solid entertainment through and through, and easily the most fun movie that Disney has produced since taking over the galaxy far, far away.