Earlier in Could, filmmaker and critic Jenny Nicholson launched the four-hour YouTube documentary The Spectacular Failure of the Star Wars Hotel. The video has since commanded practically 6 million views, and spawned dozens of follow-up thinkpieces, starting from fervent hand-wringing over the diminished nature of the trendy theme park expertise, to critics arguing towards the continued industrial viability of the Star Wars model itself, to real shock at consumer appetite for long-form video content on YouTube. I personally don’t have loads so as to add to the discourse, aside from this: Nicholson is correct in regards to the app. There was no hope for the hotel with that app.
I was there, Gandalf, throughout an abbreviated tour of Galactic Starcruiser hosted by Disney Parks in February 2022. As I made clear in my evaluate of the Star Wars hotel, Polygon was invited to the four-hour occasion on Disney’s dime. Actually, you may see footage from the exact same tour that I was on across the two-hour mark in Nicholson’s video.
At no time throughout that junket have been the various influencers or the handful of press current on board the Galactic Starcruiser, generally known as the Halcyon, given entry to the Datapad app. As a substitute, the junket was verbally annotated by Disney’s tour guides as if we had been utilizing the app all alongside. Solid members directed us to sure in-fiction occasions and performances as if we had been welcomed into these areas by the app. However Nicholson’s investigation, primarily based on her personal firsthand account of the complete expertise in addition to anecdotal reviews posted on social media by dozens of different company, paint a damning image of a chunk of software program that merely didn’t work as supposed.
The Galactic Starcruiser Datapad, itself baked into the bigger My Disney Expertise app, was imagined to be the conduit that linked company to the storyline of their alternative throughout their keep on the Star Wars hotel. In observe, nonetheless, it’s clear that the app solely labored a number of the time. Because of this, a good portion of the company that attended the (at minimal) roughly $5,000 two-day expertise have been set adrift, left untethered from no matter levers have been obtainable to the workers on website to correctly contain them within the goings-on aboard the starship. The one answer for some company was to step outdoors the fiction, choose up the cellphone or get consistent with a customer support consultant on the hotel, and complain the old style approach.
What killed Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser? I don’t suppose it was the presence of Rey and Kylo Ren or any of the opposite trappings of the modern-day trilogy. And I don’t suppose it was the dearth of partaking issues to do on the Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge theme park both, though that most likely didn’t assist issues a lot. What in the end torpedoed the Star Wars hotel was bad app design, a buggy piece of software program that was by no means fairly as much as the duty.
Sadly, the Star Wars hotel isn’t any extra. The Halcyon took company on a last voyage final 12 months in September. It’s a disgrace, as a result of a number of the performances — particularly these involving Rey and her allies within the Resistance — have been extraordinary. There’s clearly solely a lot heavy lifting {that a} devoted crew of actors can do when the digital director driving the motion fails as spectacularly because the Datapad app did right here.
