Rise of the Resistance still pretty broken; but still pretty great

Last week my family and I spent five days at Walt Disney World, hitting all four parks. I was eager to see how my experience at Hollywood Studios was going to be different from previous trips post-pandemic (we went in July and September). One area I was most interested - the new boarding group process at Rise of the Resistance.

For those that didn’t know, the process to get a boarding group for the virtual queue CHANGED AGAIN as of November 3rd, allowing app users to get a boarding group at 7am ET as long as they have a park reservation for Hollywood Studios that same day. You can debate if it’s a positive change or negative, having to get up before 7am versus having to be IN the park at 10am (or whatever opening is), but I see it as an improvement. I now will know if I can avoid waking the rest of the family and rushing them to DH or not.

And for me, it was a success, nabbing boarding group 45.

And the ride was operating well that day, getting to my boarding group just after 12pm noon.

(SPOILER ALERTS BELOW)

I’ve been on the ride about a half dozen times, starting with the first week and one other time during the post-pandemic Disney World. There were noticeable changes this iteration. There are colored dots on the floor everywhere and dividers between the groups in the pre-show as well as on the transport ship.

And of course, there were dividers on the ride vehicles themselves. Luckily for us, we actually were placed in the FRONT row of the vehicle (we were assigned SILVER), so we didn’t have a piece of flimsy plexiglass between us and the hardest ride ticket to get at WDW. I could tell just from turning around and looking at the people seated behind me though that glare and reflection would be a major annoyance to visibility.

That wasn’t the only concern: as you can see in the video below the transport ship had disabled animatronics making it hard to understand what is supposed to be happening if you were a first time rider. (Also note, that in some of the sectioned-off areas where guests are divided because of COVID restrictions, you cannot see any of the “windows” of the transport, making the experience really bad.

Not only that, when we sent the second half of our group as part of the rider swap (thanks 7 month old Colin!), the ride actually BROKE while we were in the interrogation room, forcing us to evacuate and not complete the ride that day. (This marks the second instance in maybe 6-7 ride attempts that I have been evacuated.)

All of that said, Rise of the Resistance is still one of my favorite experiences at WDW. And if I knew when the park would return to “normal”, I might recommend waiting until then to ride if its your first time. But because the removal of restrictions seems so far away from today, if you are visiting, I still recommend going through the effort to get on board.