Millennium Falcon: Smugglers Run delivers three times the fun at Disneyland

The mantra is “More, More, More” on the Millennium Falcon: Smugglers Run at Disneyland that offers up more wow moments to enjoy, more starships to shoot, more near misses to avoid and more missions to choose from — all of which makes the refreshed flight simulator a more repeatable ride.

The updated Millennium Falcon: Smugglers Run ride with the Mandalorian and Grogu debuts on Friday, May 22 in Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge at the Anaheim theme park as a tie-in to “The Mandalorian and Grogu” film coming to theaters on Memorial Day Weekend.

I rode the new Smugglers Run five times on Wednesday, May 20 during a media preview and found the updated attraction to be three times the fun of the original.

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The initial experience will feel familiar to anyone who’s ever flown the Millennium Falcon out of the Batuu spaceport. But once you take off, the pilots, gunners and engineers on board will be in for a completely new mission on Smugglers Run.

Hondo and Mando set up the adventure during the preshow moments where we are once again needed to fly the Falcon on a daring mission.

There’s no quick tour over Black Spire Outpost this time around. The action starts immediately with a hyperspace jump to Tatooine where we interrupt a high-stakes deal between ex-Imperial officers and a ruthless band of pirates. Our job: Team up with Mando and Grogu to collect the cargo crates and bring them back to Hondo.

Soon enough, we have to choose which booty of bounty to chase. That’s where the ride splits in three directions and the real fun begins.

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The engineers get to choose between three mission destinations: Bespin, Coruscant and Endor.

Which engineer chooses the destination appears to switch back and forth between the left and right rear seats. The other engineer gets to fire the tracking beacon that attaches to the target ship with the bounty.

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Everybody’s going to want to be an engineer now because there’s so much more to do than ever before. Let those who don’t know any better fight over who gets to sit in the twin pilot seats.

That said, it’s still fun to be a pilot. And the flight yokes that control the horizontal and vertical movements of the Falcon are much more responsive than the original ride.

My biggest knock on the new Smugglers Run: The swarm of bad guy ships looked less rendered than the new background scenes that were clearer and crisper than the originals.

Some of the TIE fighters and other starfighters that you get to shoot down as a Falcon gunner looked like inferior video game graphics compared to the superior background scenes worthy of a blockbuster movie on the silver screen.

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Grogu shows up on the tiny screens in the cockpit throughout the mission. You see a lot more of Mando on the Coruscant and Bespin missions than on the Endor adventure. The daring hero and youngling sidekick appear together at the end of the ride.

The variety of destinations and possible paths in each journey make the ride more unpredictable and repeatable than ever before.

My favorite destination was the bustling skyways of the city-planet Coruscant, followed by the cloud city of Bespin during golden hour and then the iconic trench run on the disintegrating Death Star in orbit near the Endor moon.

But, of course, every mission can change a bit depending on who sits in the pilot seats. And now the same is true for the engineer seats. Pity the poor souls who end up in the gunner seats with nothing to do but mindlessly fire away and hope their crewmates make all the right decisions.