The LEGO Star Wars line is no stranger to big, expensive sets. Since the second edition of the UCS Millenium Falcon in 2017, we’ve averaged one $500+ set every other year, ranging from the minifigure-scale 75313 AT-AT and 75331 Razor Crest to Star Destroyers both Imperial (75252) and Republic (75367). In 2024, we are being graced with another – and for once, it’s not overwhelmingly grey! 75397 Jabba’s Sail Barge is the latest entry to the Ultimate Collector Series line, and a minifigure-scale one, at that. With 3,942 pieces, it will retail for US $499.99 | CAN $649.99 | UK £429.99, and may also be found at third-party retailers like Amazon or eBay. This LEGO Sail Barge will start crossing the Dune Sea from October 3rd for LEGO Insiders, while journeys for everyone else start from October 6th. Jabba has invited you on board as a guest of honour; should you join him?

The LEGO Group sent The Brothers Brick an early copy of this set for review. Providing TBB with products for review guarantees neither coverage nor positive reviews.

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The box and contents

The box is a pretty beefy one. The front shows off the barge with all the minfigures atop. Well… All? This is Jabba’s Sail Barge, right? So where’s…

… Ah, there he is. The back shows how the Khetanna opens up to display the interior, including His Excellency himself. The full lineup of minifigs is shown across the top of the box as well, while the sides have some profile shots of the barge.

I was expecting to find a bunch of bags within, so imagine my surprise when all I saw was Salacious B. Crumb staring at me! He and band leader Max Rebo adorn the sides of two boxes within the main box. Let me tell you, coming across that Salacious box while you’re stumbling around your apartment half-asleep in the dark will give you a shock.

Anyway, it’s within those boxes that we finally get to the bags – all 36 of them, and almost all of them paper. Box Rebo contains bags one through 17, while the remainder is in the Salacious Crate.

The Rebo box (Rebox? OK, I’ll stop now) also contains a series of un-numbered bag with a variety of loose parts, the instructions and sticker sheet, and a major gripe. The two sails that adorn the barge come in a loose paper envelope (at the top left in the following photo), and it came quite badly folded.

This folding is annoying in and of itself, but it’s doubly so when you consider that the two instruction booklets came within a cardboard envelope to protect them from exactly this problem. This is a $500 set, LEGO. Was it that hard to put the sails in with the instructions?

The saving grace is that we have a lot to build before we use them, so I’ll leave them under the instructions and see if they get flattened out by the time they’re needed. In the meantime, we can read through some of the background information both on the barge and this set.

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The build

And just like a defeated henchman diving into the Sarlacc pit, we can dive straight into the build for the barge. The first two bags make up the base using Technic beams and frames. Immediately, we have a gauge on how big the barge will be. It’s pretty big!

That’s then covered up with plates on the top and bottom from the following two bags. It’s very sturdy – after all, it does need to support the not-inconsiderable weight of a Hutt.

Those plates are swiftly covered up by tiles. As the floor plan is built up, I’m reminded of the Modular Building series – it’s fun to guess what will go in all the gaps! You’ll notice there are some brackets going on around the sides, too. We’ll come back around to these later.

So far it’s all been fairly straightforward – but what’s this? We have a couple of intriguing sub-builds to go on. One features a couple of ball joint plates on turntables, the other some sideways clips. These will presumably help us to attach the hull down the line.

They’re locked into the front with some plates and tiles, and now we can move on to the sides. We have a new addition to the reddish brown family here: these 1×4 toothed racks

Sure enough, the claw pieces we attached to the front are for allowing the hull’s curved front to be shaped with bars and clips. Simple, yet effective.

The next bag – number eight, if you’re wondering – has us building a bunch of parts to provide even more stability to the Khetanna’s foundations. It’s the tried-and-tested method of having opposite orientation brackets linked with plates and tiles. Thanks to the geometry of LEGO, we can slot some more tiles in to add extra stability, with the added bonus of leaving no gaps.

As we reach the quarter-point of the build, we’ll start to build up the stern (i.e. the rear) of Jabba’s sail barge. We kick off with what I’m calling the tower of SNOT – there are brackets pointing every which way here!

There are a couple more re-colours at this point, with some lamp-posts in medium nougat and a nifty 1x2x2 bracket. The latter is still a relatively new design, and it’s used for some rear panelling…

… While the lamp-posts serve as columns inside the cavernous Khetanna.

We’ll continue fleshing out the interior in a moment, but first let’s cover up that Technic beam at the back. The pontoons are another area to make use of a lot of sideways building, to great effect. The smaller side ones are especially neat!

Now back to the inside. The first stickers to come off the sticker sheet will go on Max Rebo’s red ball jett organ. It’s such a neat build – again, as with the modulars, I love adding fun details like this. In contrast, the chain that we throw in the trunk just afterwards serves a slightly more sinister purpose.

Jabba the Hutt will need somewhere to sit in his boat, so we’d best not hang around building his plinth lest we get thrown into the Rancor pit. (What is it with Jabba and pits with monsters in them?) It’s accomplished with a layer of bricks forming the base, while a robot arm sits nicely in a 1×6 arch to imitate intricate woodwork.

Moving down the barge, we have the galley to contend with next. My knowledge of the Khetanna’s interior mostly comes from a hazy memory of Return of the Jedi or that one level in LEGO Star Wars: the Complete Saga. I don’t remember a kitchen, but it makes perfect sense for there to be one. To start with, we build some more furniture:

And as they’re thrown in, we build up the walls around them. It doesn’t come across all that well in the pictures, but the colour of the medium nougat bricks is rather inconsistent. As a result, the wall looks a bit patchy.

Anyway, our next wall in bag 13 is a tan one, to stop the cooking smells permeating the entire barge. When we put that 1×8 rail plate in way back in bag six, I wondered what it was for, but in retrospect, it seems obvious that it’s for a sliding door mechanism. It has stoppers at either end to stop it from flying out into the sands of Tatooine.

We decorate the walls with the rest of the parts in this bag, both for the armoury and kitchen. I was left with a strange amount of spares at the end, including an extra musket, blaster pistol and machete. That’s more of an observation than a complaint though.

The wall on the other side comes next. Nothing too special at this stage, although we do get another pair of medium nougat lamposts.

What is interesting is the way the crossbeams are made. Some 2×2 anti-stud brackets adorn the top of the columns, and a small plate sub-assembly is locked in using more of the same bracket.

A variation on the same trick is used twice more, with small differences to reflect where on the barge they go. Considering it’s made from System bits, it makes for an impressively strong structure – strong enough to pick up the whole build from.

Time to add some more detail to the interior, and bags 15 and 16 consist of ladders and a brig, respectively. The ladders make use of more SNOT techniques, while the prison cell is fairly conventional, and includes a removable wall at the back.

We’re using up the stickers at quite a rate now; there was one in the brig, and three more will make up the screens in the cockpit, which is the final bit of interior design we’re doing. Chairs and consoles first…

… Then the main display, with the screens angled on either side.

Now that we have some controls, the barge can hover, right? That’s the illusion we’ll get from the stands we make next, marking the halfway point. Even though I’ve extolled the virtues of the sail barge’s strong frame, it’s still quite unnerving having to flip it over!

We’re done with the inside now! That means we can move on to the hull, again going from back to front (or aft to fore, if we’re sticking with the boating terminology). The rearmost panel uses the same trick we saw earlier with ball joints on turntables. Technic beams hold it on, while the bar at the top clips in to set the angle.

The rear quarter-panels are next, of course. It’s a plate sandwich on top, with SNOT bricks and the other half of the ball joints on the bottom.

The same thing is then repeated for the other side – but here, I ran into a problem. Where I was expecting to pick up a 3×12 reddish brown wedge, I was instead met with a surplus 2×10 plate, with no wedge in sight. Rather irritating, to say the least. At least I can raid a spare from my copy of 75059 Sandcrawler for the sake of taking some photos…

… However, if you’ve had any experience with LEGO’s reddish brown parts, you’ll know that they go brittle after a few years; say, a decade, when the Sandcrawler came out. Perhaps inevitably, when I came to attach the replacement wedge, it snapped almost immediately.

By now I was not in the best of moods, and unwilling to risk my brown parts any further, I swapped the broken part out for the only other such wedge I have in my collection. We’ll come back to this at the end of the review. But for now, every time you see this dark bluish-grey wedge, remember: this set costs $500.

Anyway. For what it’s worth, the shaping these assemblies give is great. The turntables don’t give a huge amount of extra slack in the system, but it’s enough to make connecting them a breeze.

The next hull panels get rattled off fairly quickly. Bags 20 & 21 22 & 23 are opened in their respective pairs for the rearmost panel…

… The middle ones are covered in bag 24…

… And the front in bags 25 and 26. There’s a nifty trick with an opposite pair of wedge plates linked with a hinge to replicate the shape of the ‘real’ sail barge’s panels.

For reasons that will become apparent later, the instructions recommend you keep the panels open at this point. It was easier for me to close them so I could manhandle the barge around.

It’s just the front panels left now, and once again we have some more instances of opposite wedges linked with a hinge plate. The front quarter panels also include a 2×3 pointy wedge rotated around its single stud connection point.

Just like before, these are linked to the ball joints.

On the very front-most portion of the hull, the two opposite wedges are locked together with some 1×2 round plates.

The rest of it is all connection points to two outer panels and to the rest of the ship.

With that done, we have one more sub-assembly to throw on above the cockpit…

… And the exterior plating is done. It’s a nice representation of the way the armour plating fans out at the front of the ship.

We’re opening two bags at the same time again as we start on the top deck. This is split into two portions, with the aft one the first to go together. There are some curious rubber Technic bushings hidden in the base.

There are links to the rest of the craft that become apparent too – this hatch will sit at the top of one of the ladders. Again, it’s like the stairwells you might find in some modular buildings.

Those 2×2 anti-stud brackets are getting a lot of love in this set – amid some more tiling, two are used here to put a Technic axle brick on its side. This is where the masts will slot into later.

When it comes to furnishing the top deck, we have two elements to add. One is this… Thing. I’m not sure what it is – perhaps a ventilation shaft – but it’s cleverly built.

No mistaking the next bit, though. This is the cannon that, in the hands of Princess Leia, would ultimately lead to the Khetanna’s demise.

These, together with some flex tube railings, finish up the rear top deck. There are four different lengths of flex tube provided, with the lengths indicated in the instructions. But without actually measuring them, there’s no way of knowing which is which. You can’t even figure it out from the parts list, as they make no mention of the length there. So make sure you have a 12″ ruler at the ready at this point.

The front deck is built in a similar manner. Some small doors on their side provide further access to the lower decks.

The front isn’t as busy as the back, but there are still some fun details. I always like seeing flexible whips used as greebling, and they look the part here.

Both elements slot in very nicely, modular building-style, to the main ship… Or they would, if this reviewer had bothered to check the rear deck was properly in place before taking this photo. Obviously, it’s supposed to sit flush to the walls below. D’oh!

We can see what those Technic bushings are used for, too. The bar plates on the side panel slot in to prevent them from flopping open under their own weight. They don’t come in at right angles, which is why the rubber was used – and to be fair, it does work well. You can also see one of the two cannons which get built after the decks go on.

We’re firmly on the home straight now, with only a few more bits to clip on. The last of the stickers gets used up on the steering vanes to add a bit more detail. I complained a bit about inconsistent colours in the plastic bricks before, but the colour matching between these stickers and the reddish brown parts that surround them is absolutely terrible. Still, on they go.

The penultimate bag includes the masts, made out of Technic axles. But will the sails have been pressed flat enough to sit nicely on them, after their unfortunate folding?

It seems so! You can see they’re still a little curled up at the top, but the material is nice and thick, so it seems LEGO’s blushes have been spared somewhat. They’re really nice parts; I can see people building dragon wings with these down the line.

We’re not done yet, of course: we have a printed plaque and stand to build yet. There’s a printed 25th-anniversary brick too, which also appeared in this year’s other UCS set, 75382 TIE Interceptor.

The stand has a space for Jabba to sit on, but otherwise, it’s nothing special.

At that point I thought we were done, but no! There’s one more stand to build, which has space for the other nine minifigures, plus Salacious Crumb. This isn’t advertised anywhere at all on the box, so I was a little surprised – albeit pleasantly so – to see it included.

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The minifigures

Speaking of which, we have 11 characters populating our sail barge: nine conventional minifigures, and two more specialised figures (Jabba and Salacious Crumb). Three of them are new figures for this set: from left to right, we have Jabba’s goons Kithaba, Wooof and Vizam.

Kithaba has appeared once before, in 2012’s 9496 Desert Skiff, but this iteration is much more accurate. The other two are making their LEGO debuts, and look great. Wooof even gets a new helmet mould to celebrate the occasion.

His head features an alternate expression as well. Vizam has to settle for a re-use of the Nikto head print from the Pirate Snub Fighter that appeared last year, but it still looks the part.

The next patrons of the barge are also returning figs. Max Rebo makes a welcome return having not been seen for 10 years, using the same headpiece as before. Bib Fortuna also re-uses a headpiece, but it’s the same as the one that appeared in Boba Fett’s Throne Room in 2022, rather than his more… Shall we say, svelte self, as he was in Return of the Jedi.

The Gamorrean Guard is also re-used from that set, but I have no complaints about that figure. Bib does feature a reversible head, for what it’s worth.

Then, our heroes! Much like Max Rebo, this is the first time we’ve seen this version of Leia for a long time; she gets a new rubber hairpiece and dual-moulded legs to represent her skirt.

Leia comes with a neck bracket, but she still gets back printing too, as well as an alternate, Jabba-strangling expression. R2-D2 also gets back printing; it’s not the first time he’s had it, but it’s the first time I’ve come across it, and it does elevate the figure.

I’m not sure about Leia’s dual-moulded legs; it looks a bit like she’s wearing shorts rather than a bikini skirt. And while Threepio does have arm printing, it would’ve been nice if he could have the dual-moulded leg that appears in 75398 C-3PO. I do like that Leia’s rubber hairpiece doesn’t restrict her head movement, though.

Salacious B. Crumb makes just his second appearance in LEGO form in this set. I believe it’s the same mould as appeared in 9516 Jabba’s Palace but in a different colourway with new printing. The last one’s eyes looked a little derpy, but these have gone a bit too far the other way in my opinion – he looks possessed! Still, he’s a nice figure to have.

And last but not least, His Excellency Jabba Desilijic Tiure of Nal Hutta, Eminence of Tatooine! This is also a re-used mould, but that’s more than OK: it’s pretty perfect.

His head can rotate around his body thanks to a Technic pin, while his right arm features an accurate Desilijic kajidic symbol tattoo.

 

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The finished model

Back to the sail barge then, and if you ignore the dodgy sticker colours and that incorrect wedge, I have to say I’m impressed with how it looks!

The shaping of the hull is nice, particularly around the front.

The windows at the back can open up, but to get access to the rest of it you’ll want to open up the sides. Be careful when you do so; although the steering vanes are on ball joints, it’s not impossible for them to jam between the floor and side panel.

You’ll probably want to take the top decks off too, particularly if you want to put Jabba in place. There is enough room to get him in without doing so, but it’s far easier this way.

I do feel a little sorry for Max Rebo; he feels a little tucked away in his little corner. I feel like he could’ve done with a bandmate or two, as well. It’s good for Jabba, though – he can easily request his favourite tunes like Lapti Nek or Jedi Rocks.

The kitchen is nicely decked out, and although there’s enough room for the Gamorrean Guard to chase his dinner, it does feel a little cramped.

Thankfully, the ladder in the centre is easily removable, and that gives you loads more room. Kithaba doesn’t look particularly happy about everyone invading his kitchen space though!

Next door we have the armoury, and here too it’s a little tricky to access the weapons; but unlike the galley, this ladder isn’t designed to be removable. The prison is, though, so you can lock up naughty patrons or overly talkative protocol droids. I think they know how to get to Mos Espa, Threepio.

Whatever would he do without Artoo to break him out, eh?

Despite its 11-strong figure lineup, I can’t help but feel the good guys are a little outnumbered. With all due respect to the two droids, the only one who can really put up a fight is Leia, and that does limit play somewhat. Now to be fair, at this point in the film most of the others are on a desert skiff, which you can buy in the form of 75396 Desert Skiff & Sarlacc Pit. But that’s an extra 80 bucks, on top of the 500 you’re spending here. Even if it was just Luke repeated here, that would’ve evened things up a bit. Without the skiff, it feels a little incomplete.

The interior and top deck are all minifigure-compatible, and while ‘minifigure scale’ does have quite a hazy definition, the bulk of the barge does look to be at a slightly different scale to the exterior. It looks alright on its own, but the figures do look awkwardly big when displayed up top. I’m not sure there’s an easy way around that particular problem, though.

The other consequence is that it’s not so easy to manoeuvre minifigures around beneath the sails. On the other hand, they are easy to take off if you do want a bit more access. And either way, I did have a blast messing around with the figures!

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Conclusions and recommendation

So after all the ups and downs, what do we make of Jabba’s Sail Barge? Let’s get the good stuff out of the way first. I’ve referenced LEGO’s modular building series a few times throughout this review, and this might be as close as you can get to a Star Wars equivalent. It straddles the line between playset and display piece very well. The only real distraction is the slight clash of scales between the top deck and the rest of the exterior. One or two of the minifigs have room for improvement, and having more would always be welcome, but I’m satisfied with what’s included. Overall, it just about – just – does enough to justify that $500 price tag. And that there could have been the end of the review.

But we need to address the dark bluish-grey elephant in the room. Normally I’d chalk up a missing piece to bad luck – after all, this is only the second time it’s happened to me personally in 20+ years of collecting LEGO. However, for those keeping count at home, this is the third time this year that one of our review sets has had a missing part, and the second time in the space of a week after Kyle’s Peely Bone problem. That’s starting to look less like a coincidence and more like a worrying trend.

And look – I understand it’s hard to make a process that will get things perfect 100% of the time. But in case you had forgotten, this costs $500. For that price, a set should be perfect, in every aspect. That doesn’t just include the design – which, to reiterate, is great. But that great design is let down by the folded sails, parts errors, and poorly colour-matched bricks and stickers. Justifying such a big price tag was always going to be a tall order. On the evidence I’ve seen, 75397 Jabba’s Sail Barge falls frustratingly short. At best, I would wait for a discount – by then, perhaps the quality issues will have been sorted out. We can but hope.

LEGO Star Wars 75397 Jabba’s Sail Barge contains 3,942 pieces, and will be released on October 3rd for LEGO Insiders; general release is on October 6th. It will retail for US $499.99 | CAN $649.99 | UK £429.99, but may also be available from third-party sellers such as Amazon or eBay.

The LEGO Group sent The Brothers Brick an early copy of this set for review. Providing TBB with products for review guarantees neither coverage nor positive reviews.

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