Last Thursday, I pre-scheduled a post that mentioned I was going to Disneyland with my boyfriend, and that we were hoping to snag a coveted spot on their new Rise of the Resistance ride. Good news: we did! More complicated news: I still don’t know what to think of Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge overall, which I’m going to get into below.
First, some context: both Disneyland in California and Walt Disney World in Orlando opened up identical Star Wars theme-park expansions last year, with the aim of crafting an immersive experience on par with Universal’s wildly successful Harry Potter worlds. Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge opened up with just one ride, the simulator-based Millennium Falcon: Smuggler’s Run, as well as a cantina, lightsaber and droid workshops, and a variety of themed shops. Unlike Harry Potter, which launched with multiple original and converted rides, and hosted street shows and productions like the wand selection free of additional charge, Galaxy’s Edge tucks its lightsaber experience behind a hefty price tag, and its cantina (at least initially) required reservations just to step inside.
There’s no denying that Galaxy’s Edge looks great—both the Orlando and Anaheim locations hide the outside world so effectively that they feel like their own miniature parks, and there’s no place on Batuu, the newly created planet on which Galaxy’s Edge is set, where you can see immersion-breaking peeks at other parts of the Disney parks. But it also felt, when we visited Orlando last fall, oddly empty. There were plenty of guests, sure, and you could wander around and buy things, but that's about it if you didn’t want to wait for hours to ride Smuggler’s Run. When we visited, Hollywood Studios was still doing “Extra, Extra Magic Hours” for resort guests, so we rode the ride just after 6:00 a.m., had quick breakfast mocktails at the cantina, and then were off to the rest of the park by…6:30 or so.
Smuggler’s Run is also, unfortunately, one of the lesser Disney rides I’ve experienced from the park’s recent history. While there’s nothing like turning the last corner in the queue and seeing the iconic interior of the Millennium Falcon, the ride itself is a simulator not unlike Star Tours, which has operated in Disney parks around the world since 1987. For my “credits,” it’s worse in a lot of ways: while Star Tours loads 20+ guests into an obvious simulator, the rides you experience are randomized, and can come in dozens of variations, which are easy to update as each new film hits theaters. It’s also fairly turbulent, and can do a good job of mimicking turns and dives. Smuggler’s Run is, at least for the foreseeable future, locked into one storyline, which all but removes any incentive to line up more than once. And because of how much is going on during that ride, motion feels minimal—or at least not memorable.
The real deathblow for Smuggler’s Run is the way it forces interactivity. Six guests fit in each cockpit: two pilots, two gunners, and two engineers. In Orlando, Juni and I were engineers. In Anaheim, we were gunners. As the ride is fairly popular, there’s not much opportunity to request a role, and the only role worth requesting is pilot. The pilots sit up front, their view uncompromised by the other riders. They have the full console in front of them, and get to perform the iconic jump to hyperdrive. The gunners and engineers, meanwhile, have to mash buttons to their sides, away from the screen. And I do mean mash—I remember having to press a few different variations as engineer, but 90% of my time as gunner was just repetitively pounding the same square button like the world’s spammiest Street Fighter player. It genuinely felt uncomfortable by the end, and the times where I had to look away from the actual attraction to search for the right nondescript lit-up square were the opposite of immersive.
I could potentially overlook the side placement of these buttons if the interactivity was mostly illusion, but the ride does seem to depend on all six guests decently executing their functions, and after two rides, I have learned that Disney rides should not depend on guests decently executing their functions. While our Orlando pilots were acceptable if sloppy, I’m not sure our Anaheim pilots ever really understood that they were affecting the ride. The result, for the four of us who were in no way related to the randomly chosen strangers in the Han and Chewie slots, was a screen show of near-constant explosions and collisions, and a opportunistic Weequay pirate admonishing us all nonstop. Any illusion of nerd-cool that might come from stepping into the Millennium Falcon cockpit is shattered when two oblivious strangers turn your joy ride into intergalactic bumper cars. Two out of six guests have an outsized effect on what the other four experience, and that’s just not fun for anyone who isn’t in a group of six already.
I’m not sure how either the side-positioned actions or the variability of the experience got past Imagineering, and I hope the opening months of feedback eventually lead them to turn Smuggler’s Run into a less interactive simulator, because something with three times the wait and over 30 years of additional engineering on Star Tours should not be a more frustrating experience than Star Tours. But even if they do eventually take the controls out of the hands of tourists who aren’t even sure they’re really piloting anything, Smuggler’s Run is still locked into one storyline, with a brief Chewie cameo but a significantly larger focus on a character that has only appeared in the animated series, which leads me to my next issue with Galaxy’s Edge…
Who is any of this for?
Star Wars is divided into three mutually exclusive eras. Darth Vader never walked Tatooine alongside Kylo Ren, and Rey doesn’t meet Padmé Amidala. Clone Troopers and Sith Troopers are separated by a good half-century. The Sequel Trilogy, despite divisive fan and critical responses, is Disney’s current investment, and undeniably has mass appeal—for now. But in five years, will the average Star Wars fan want to see Hondo Ohnaka and Vi Moradi in a Disney park, or Darth Vader and Yoda? Does the average Star Wars fan even know who Hondo Ohnaka and Vi Moradi are? I’m a fairly active follower of the cartoons and comics, and had to Google “Galaxy’s Edge spy” to remember the latter’s name, as she only appears in a few tie-in novels and is essentially an Easter egg in the parks themselves.
As big of a Star Wars mark as I am, I am not looking to pretend I’m part of the saga when I visit a Star Wars theme park, or at least not when I’m just walking around between attractions. The Wizarding World of Harry Potter can pull that illusion off to a greater extent because Harry Potter takes place in a realistic contemporary world that has a hidden magical side. Star Wars takes place a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. No amount of forcing cast members to say “credits” and refer to other parts of the park as “off-world” will convince me that the family of five in matching Blue Lives Matter t-shirts are just visitors from Naboo on a quick interstellar stopover.
I do have friends who have thrown themselves into the half-hidden roleplay aspects of Galaxy’s Edge and come away with a more favorable view of the park, but some subtle changes since the additions opened seem to indicate I’m closer to the majority reaction. A key architect behind the Galaxy’s Edge rollout stepped down from the company, menus were updated to more clearly indicate real-world ingredients over “ronto meat,” and cast members were told to lighten up on attempts to speak “in-universe.”
Perhaps ironically, all of these steps away from immersion predated the opening of Galaxy’s Edge’s second, and for now final, attraction, Rise of the Resistance. Guests have to try their luck at a virtual queue at 9:00 a.m. on the dot to ride it; we were actually in a standby group, but thankfully the ride had seemingly no down-time, and we were able to ride around 4:30 p.m., with many, many more groups called by the end of the day. And let me tell you, as someone who has visited every park except for Shanghai: Rise of the Resistance is easily one of the best rides in any theme park today.
Taking almost 15 minutes start to finish, Rise of the Resistance is the best possible version of Galaxy’s Edge’s attempt at immersion, with in-character cast members used well but sparingly, impressive use of space and misdirection, and every ride trick in the Disney playbook short of a rollercoaster. I won’t spoil any of it, but trust this otherwise cynical Galaxy’s Edge guest when I say the hype is real.
But.
I’m not sure how much of that next-level attention to detail was appreciated by all of the guests around me. At the risk of giving too much credence to one obnoxious woman in my boarding group, she complained about the interactive queue portions, laughed and talked back at the cast members, and didn’t shut up and enjoy herself until her butt was planted in the ride vehicle. I can’t remember what she said verbatim, because I wanted to obliterate her from orbit with the Death Star by this point, but she just wanted to “sit down and ride this already” while at least some of the rest of us were marveling at the consideration put into every aspect of the experience.
I think, more than anything, that she was just a dud of a person, but I wonder how many guests just want to “sit down and ride [stuff] already” at Disney, versus how many want to immerse themselves between The Last Jedi and Rise of Skywalker. Time will tell how lasting the ST era proves to be, but the overall derivative nature of the Resistance/First Order conflict, and the extreme time crunch of this saga—the whole thing takes place in just about two years—means opportunities to flesh out Rey, Finn, Poe, and Kylo’s stories are limited, and Disney’s decision to lean toward cartoon-only and original characters over the crowd pleasers feels shockingly similar to the thinking behind Darth Maul’s befuddling appearance in Solo. Disney is confident that Star Wars fans seeing the movies are either already consuming all the other media or are willing to, but signs point toward a more substantial portion of casual fans wanting to sit their butt in a seat—either of a theater or of a ride vehicle—without having to do the extra lore research.
Galaxy’s Edge really only works if you are willing to commit to it to an almost LARP-like level, but its marquee attraction should keep it neck and neck with Pandora for a long time to come. I just have to wonder what Disney could have accomplished if they eased up on the immersion and aimed the park at the average Star Wars fan instead of the super-consumer—and I say that as someone with a life-sized Yoda statue in my parents’ house.
But hey, the vegan options at Galaxy’s Edge are great. Green milk > blue milk, tbh.