How we were taken prisoner but escaped the clutches of Kylo Ren on new Star Wars ride

The Resistance has set up a military outpost in the woods near Black Spire, the settlement on the planet Batuu where an epic battle is brewing between the freedom fighters — successors to the Rebel Alliance — and the First Order.

Here, in Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge, amid spies, recruiters, refugees and scoundrels and around the corner from a full-size Millennium Falcon, Disney has created an attraction that has me sweating it out in a First Order prison cell, fearing Kylo Ren will return to interrogate me before the Resistance busts me and 15 cellmates out.

You can’t just call Rise of the Resistance a ride. It is a full-blown attraction in several acts that ends after a skidding ride in a trackless vehicle seeking an escape pod.

The attraction combines multiple ride technologies including the trackless vehicle, a simulator experience, animatronics, giant screens, and smart droids. Past the queue, once you enter the pre-show, the attraction lasts at least 20 minutes and easily longer.

Rise of the Resistance, the second major attraction in Galaxy’s Edge at Disney’s Hollywood Studios, opened to the public on Thursday. On Wednesday, several hundred members of the press got to ride it. It wasn’t perfect — by mid-afternoon the ride had stopped operating twice and once riders had to be evacuated through a side exit. Later, the prison cell I was destined for must have malfunctioned because the doors opened, and other Resistance recruits were led out. After time passed, my group was led in and everything worked.

But all the adjectives Disney has been using to promote it are correct. It is ambitious, advanced and immersive. Let me add a couple more: entertaining, thrilling and occasionally funny. It’s complicated enough that I needed to experience it several times to catch everything.

The entrance to Rise of the Resistance looks like grimy old machinery, its once-white walls stained by what appear to be rust, oil and weather. Like most structures on Batuu, this one has been cobbled together with repurposed parts. The Resistance doesn’t have the resources for shiny new aircraft and equipment.

The story line is essentially this: Via hologram, Rey, the heroine of the final trilogy of the Star Wars movies, recruits us to help the Resistance as a First Order Star Destroyer approaches. We board a transport shuttle, which is supposed to take us to Gen. Leia Organa.

But as Lt. Bek comments in horror, the Star Destroyer uses a tractor beam to draw the shuttle into its hangar bay. We are prisoners.

As we step out of the shuttle, we are confronted by 50 animatronic stormtroopers and live actors playing sneering First Order soldiers, while the beginning of what will become a fiery battle plays out on a giant screen — the scene outside the window. It is a dramatic moment.

We are marched past a full-size TIE fighter and into interrogation cells. Kylo Ren appears on a catwalk and demands to know the location of the Resistance’s secret base. No one speaks, and Ren gets called to the bridge before any really nasty interrogation begins.

Meanwhile leaders of the Resistance, including Finn and Poe Dameron, are plotting our escape. A side door opens and we board eight-person cars piloted by droids. Fortunately our droid has been hacked by the Resistance and ordered to get us to an escape pod.

But the Star Destroyer is gigantic, and we spend a lot of time skidding around it — time enough for Kylo Ren to realize the prisoners he was still planning to interrogate are escaping.

This is the heart of the experience, and it has an element of the gang that couldn’t shoot straight. Stormtroopers are firing blasters at us, we race between the legs of AT-AT walkers whose crews haven’t noticed us, slide into an elevator that is supposed to go down but instead raises us until we are at eye level with the AT-AT crews. Immediately they’re firing on us too.

We whip around a couple corners and stop, breathless, hiding in plain sight right behind Kylo Ren. Who programmed this droid? Within seconds he turns around and spots us and we’re fleeing again. This time he pursues us, cutting through the ceiling of our next hiding place with his light saber just as we slip out.

All this time, the air battle has been going on outside, and we catch glimpses of flaming star craft, the destroyer’s giant guns firing above us, and signs that the very Star Destroyer we’re still aboard is slowly collapsing. Can we get off this ship first?

Finally we speed into an escape pod and our vehicle shoots out through the flaming wreckage. There are a few moments of free fall before we crash into Batuu. We have survived.

This story was originally published December 4, 2019 at 5:00 AM with the headline "How we were taken prisoner but escaped the clutches of Kylo Ren on new Star Wars ride."