Flying the Millennium Falcon Is Great but Somehow the Least Impressive Thing about Disney’s Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge

Smugglers Run is like a more advanced version of the classic Star Tours motion simulator ride. As George Lucas said at the Galaxy Edge dedication ceremony on Wednesday, it’s “Star Tours on steroids at a level you can’t imagine.” A flight party of six guests will pilot the ship through a smuggling mission that uses images on the cockpit’s screen and a light range of motion (rocking back and forth, or tilting slightly up and down) to simulate actual flight. As high-tech as this motion simulator is, it still lacks the overpowering physical sensation of a ride with a fuller range of motion. Still, it feels like you’re flying, and so there’s a strong element of wish fulfillment for anybody who grew up a Star Wars fan.

It was intentionally designed with significant videogame aspects, and unfortunately those undermine the ride experience. It makes sense that Disney would take the approach they did—only two people can actually sit at the instrument panel and pilot the ship, and if Smugglers Run only let two people board per ride the wait time would be unfathomable. But without defined tasks for other guests to perform, they wouldn’t have as interactive or immersive an experience as the pilots. So they’ve added two roles in addition to pilot: gunner and engineer. The gunners sit in the second row of seats (instead of climbing down into the turrets beneath the ship’s belly, as seen in the films), the engineers in the third, and with the two pilots in the front that comes to six passengers per voyage. While the pilots actually steer the ship, pulling up and down or right and left to avoid obstacles during the ride, the gunners and engineers have to press buttons on the cockpit’s walls as they light up—the gunners to shoot down TIE fighters, the engineers to fix damage to the Falcon on the fly. At the end of each trip the ride gives you a final score, just like a videogame.

The problem is that the non-pilot roles are limited and repetitive, and yet take your attention away from the ride itself. You’ll find yourself too busy looking at the walls of the cockpit and pressing buttons to pay full attention to the screen in front of you. Instead of making you feel like a more active participant in this smuggling mission, pressing those buttons makes you miss much of the excitement happening on screen. And the score, which is measured in “Galactic credits,” doesn’t amount to much more than bragging rights (supposedly it will impact your reputation within the rest of Galaxy’s Edge, although I never saw what kind of shape that will take during my time at the park this week).

Serving as a game also limits the narrative possibilities of the ride’s story. I’m not a huge fan of Star Tours, but I’ve always liked how it encompasses a broad spectrum of Star Wars bric-a-brac, from encounters with recognizable characters to quick jaunts to familiar worlds. The film, as it is, for Smugglers Run focuses entirely on the mission at hand, which from a theme perspective is smart, but also makes it feel a little one-dimensional and overly regimented—like you’re flying through a tunnel, but one that doesn’t even have the decency to be a Death Star trench run.

The ride still packs a lot of pure thrill power into its run time. It’s one of the best motion simulator rides in any theme park in the world today, and absolutely captures that lifelong dream of flying the Millennium Falcon. After such an amazing queue and preshow, though, and when surrounded by such an elaborate, realistic and lifelike recreation of a Star Wars settlement, the actual ride of Smugglers Run feels a little disappointing. It’s both a ride and a massive arcade game, but the two don’t entirely mesh together as well as you might hope.

Of course there’s undue pressure on Smugglers Run since it’s the only ride open at the launch of Galaxy’s Edge. This was always envisioned as the less groundbreaking of two rides within the land, and the other one, Star Wars: Rise of the Resistance, won’t be open until later this year. I walked through part of Rise of the Resistance during a tour back in February, and even in a very unfinished state I could tell that it’s going to make people rethink what can be possible in a theme park ride. Resistance features multiple different ride systems, various setpieces on an unheard-of scale, and perhaps the most ambitious plans of any theme park ride ever designed. Millennium Falcon: Smugglers Run, meanwhile, is essentially the land’s secondary attraction, one that exists not to wow us with its advances in technology and design, but to simply put us in control of this iconic spaceship. It pulls that off with more style and attention to detail than you might expect. It might not be the greatest ride ever built, but it’s still glorious and unforgettable.

Senior editor Garrett Martin writes about videogames, comedy, travel, theme parks, wrestling, and anything else that gets in his way. He shares stories and photos from his Disney journeys on Instagram at @garrett_goes_to_disney. He’s also on Twitter @grmartin.