How do you approach a set like LEGO Star Wars 75419 Death Star? LEGO’s worst-kept secret is more than just another set for collectors. It’s an escalation in testing the limits of how far fans will go to prove their commitment to the tribe. It’s a viral-ready stunt just waiting to be put on a wakeboard. It’s a totem to draw fans to their LEGO store to see it in person. It is set to make the Imperial Dignitary’s hat the must-have accessory of the season. And it’s also a remarkably well-engineered diorama that captures so much of what makes minifigure-scale LEGO an enduring delight. But I’m getting ahead of myself. First I have to build this thing.
LEGO Star Wars 75419 Death Star | 9023 Pieces | Available October 1 | US $999.99 | CAN $1299.99 | UK £899.99
The LEGO Group provided The Brothers Brick with an early copy of this set for review. Providing TBB with products for review guarantees neither coverage nor positive reviews.
Unboxing
As with other Ultimate Collector Sets, the Death Star gets the premium package design treatment. Lid flaps have exclusive art. The three inner boxes are beautifully designed and hide a hidden Vader graphic. Even the inner boxes hide more art when their lids are removed. It’s definitely a step up from your typical set, if not revolutionary.
Split up across the three inner boxes are 81 numbered paper bags, 6 square-bound instruction manuals, 1 plastic bag of larger elements, and one big sticker sheet.
I start by organizing the first 27 bags sequentially then sit down for building fun.
The Build
The Death Star is built from the ground up. No sub-assemblies or side builds – we dive right into sturdy base. The first 8 bags are visually the least interesting part of the entire build. Aside from a dash of greebling, the base isn’t meant to be examined and is all about ensuring a solid center of gravity for the rest of the build.
There is one sly reference in the base – an Octan tank. I’m guessing this is a backup power source in case the Hypermatter reactor gives out.
The remainder of the first instruction book is limited to the literal ground floor, the hangar floor being the first area that comes into focus. Stickers are used for detailing, and while they look good enough, I can’t help but wonder if there wasn’t a brick-built mosaic option for the floor that could have worked.
We also add the first section of the elevator. You’ll become very familiar with this particular sub-assembly over the course of six floors.
Thus far, I’m not that impressed with the build process. Roughly 2000 bricks in and it’s still groundwork with little in the way of clever techniques.
Thankfully things pick up with the second instruction book as we dive right into the trash compactor. Even when fully open, it’s a fairly compact space, but comes with an effective play mechanism to close in the walls.
From there we move up to the interrogation chamber and a hidden cubby for a minkit, those collectibles from the LEGO Star Wars video games.
With the third book, things get visually a lot more interesting. We start by building a large star-speckled wall for the back of the hangar. In a panel interview we attended, the lead set designer, César Soares, said that originally this wall was meant to be removeable, but in practice it turned out to be slightly loadbearing, causing a slight lean when removed.
After the wall, we add some iconic locations like the control room where Threepio listens to his friends being brutally squished and the detention unit where Han gets to try out his improv skills. The book wraps up with Obi Wan’s tractor beam device.
Book 4 adds Darth Vader’s meditation chamber. In The Empire Strikes Back, this chamber is on his Star Destroyer, but it makes sense that there would be a similar unit on the Death Star.
We also add a conference room for the bigwig Imperials to plot in and a station for the gunners of this fully-operational battle station.
Book 5 opens with building the superlaser. Flashbacks to the Van Gogh Sunflowers set as dozens of “petals” are added to build the array. I find this sort of unprecise building to be very stressful, but the end result is impressive.
Inside the superlaser is a small easter egg reference to Andor, the very device he and his fellow inmates built on Narkina V.
Most of the remainder of this book goes towards the Emperor’s Throne Room – easily one of the best-looking rooms in the Death Star.
The window behind the throne is another of those flower-petal techniques to test one’s patience, but the results are worth it.
The final bag adds a silly easter egg – the Stormtrooper Hot Tub (hidden behind a flap so that your Death Star looks “serious” by default.
After one more strip of “roof” for our disc, we end by building a midiscale shuttle and a plaque.
Let’s take a moment to appreciate the many Bothans bags who gave their lives to make this mighty set.
The minifigures
Throughout that marathon, we’ve had no shortage of minifigures popping up here and there – 38 in total. 7 of those are new exclusives, so let’s start with those.
The only new minifigure mould in this set belongs to the Imperial Dignitary’s hat – or Sim Aloo, to give him his in-universe name. The character, that is, not the hat. We’ve had a few LEGO Star Wars video game references already, and the Hot Tub Stormtrooper appears to be another one. For such a decidedly un-serious figure, he’s well decked-out with some dual-moulded swimshorts.
Then, we have some Imperial top-brass. Perhaps most exciting of all is Galen Erso in his unique dark green uniform. It’s nice to see some Rogue One representation, but the thought of this figure’s price on the aftermarket is already making me quiver. Admiral Motti (centre) and General Tagge round out our new figures.
The rest of the figures are technically repeats, although the next three are the rarest of the lot. Director Krennic gets a new faceprint relative to his only other apperance back in the Rogue One wave of sets. Admiral Yularen also appeared once before, but only in a polybag. Again, it’s mixed feelings about getting another appearance of lesser-seen figures (yay!) but having them locked behind a four-figure price tag (boo!). At least Grand Moff Tarkin is marginally less unusual.
Someone needs to give Krennic a sassy reminder not to choke on his aspirations, so good job we have Darth Vader around. And to keep him in line, Emperor Palpatine. Nothing new about these figures. They both have leg printing designed to extend their robes beyond their hips.
Many of the remaining imperial workforce appear in duplicate, so they rather inflate the figure count somewhat. A massive moon-sized battle station doesn’t run itself, you know. There is at least some nice variety of skin tones.
That’s also the case with the stormtrooper garrison, of which we have half a dozen. Yes, almost a sixth of the minifigures in your $1,000 Star Wars set are imperial grunts. They cover the full range of skin tones that LEGO offers, which is nice. Unlike many of the others in this set, though, they are not double-sided.
28 down, 10 to go, and now we can start talking about the good guys. Han, Chewie and Leia kick things off. It’s mostly a case of ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’ here, which is… Fine, I guess.
Luke Skywalker appears multiple times, in his Return of the Jedi and A New Hope outfits (with lightsabers to match). The dual-sided heads are both identical.
But they’re not his only appearances – he and Han also get to don stormtrooper outfits. We forgot a phot from the front – whoops! – but it is literally their heads on the standard stormtrooper oufit, so you’re not missing out on much.
Then, finally, we have Obi-Wan ‘Old Ben’ Kenobi, R2-D2, and C-3PO. Yet again, we find Threepio in a premium set without the fantastic dual-moulded leg that was made for the UCS Landspeeder. The practical joke figure hot tub stormtrooper gets dual-moulding, but not one of only two characters to appear in every Skywalker Saga film? It’s an element that’s literally in production right now!
At best, I think we can describe the minifigure selection as sub-par. Let’s populate our Death Star with them and see how they look.
Finished Model
Many Star Wars fans expressed disappointment or confusion by the decision to make the Death Star a disc rather than a sphere or half sphere. I can understand that from the perspective of builders who gravitate to vehicle models and prefer consistency on their shelves. 75419 Death Star is labeled a UCS set, but in spirit it’s actually a successor to the “Master Builder” sets for Mos Eisley and Cloud City being a minifig-scaled playset. Personally, I think it was a mistake to call this a UCS model as that sets the wrong expectation.
Setting aside those expectations and looking at this Death Star on its own merits, it is a beautiful diorama to look at. Each room showcases the brilliant production design of the Star Wars films with a level off detail rarely seen in LEGO sets to date.
As a large-scale LEGO model, it’s an impressive work of engineering that is surprisingly stable despite being so tall and narrow. (The heavy foundation laying in the first 25 or so bags pays off here, if not in delightful techniques).
The playset logic is tight, as with the exception of the Hanger control room, every room in the Death Star is accessible via elevator and walkways. It’s an immersive and toyetic set filled with functions to play with and with characters to move round to recreate beloved scenes.
But even as a diorama display set, there are some major concerns and disappointments.
The back of the model is a mess. Clearly the set is meant to be displayed with the back to a wall, and spinning it around to view the other side isn’t easy. The amount of additional parts and weight needed to cover up the back would have increased a steep price tag even further, so the lack of polish there is understandable, but it severely undercuts the “luxury” status.
And while I said previously that it is surprisingly sturdy, that doesn’t mean it’s an elegant model to work with once built. I accidentally yanked off half the hangar floor at one point rotating the model. Many of the rooms and floors are layered on with minimal connection studs, as if it was a modular, only to get a few plates locking the modules together later. The higher up you go, the more dubious the integrity feels.
Some of the rooms are tiny and with no easy way to remove layers, are all but accessible. I cant get my hand into the hangar control room or access the back chair in the conference room. This is a grown-up concept that won’t fit grown-up hands.
The minifigures are also a disappointment for a set that sets such premium expectations. Many of the Star Wars molds, especially the latest generation of Vader an the Stormtrooper helmets, are some of the best minifig elements LEGO has ever made, but they aren’t new here. The only new mold is the Imperial Dignitary’s hat. Hot Tub Stormtrooper’s shorts and Galen Erso’s shirt are novel prints. The remainder of new elements are subtle. And some characters who have had premium versions in other sets, like C-3PO, get a visual downgrade with the absence of dual-molded elements aside from Stormtrooper helms. It’s also hard to get too excited about “most” when there are 6 stormtroopers and pairs of all the other imperial types inflating that number. It’s great getting 3 versions of Luke, but as all share the same face prints, even that feels less than premium.
Final Thoughts
In theory, I am the target audience. While a Star Wars fan, I’m not excited by most of the vehicle builds and minifig variations that are the stables of LEGO’s offerings. What I love about the films is the lived in worldbuilding – the incredible sets and visual language of places like Mos Eisley, Bespin, and Coruscant. My all time favorite LEGO sets are immersive playsets – Rivendell, Ninjago City Gardens, Lion Knights Castle. The prospect of a large scale playset in the Star Wars universe for adult builders is genuinely the type of set I’d most like to see from this IP.
75419 Death Star does not satisfy that craving.
Building a set of this size tests the limits of “fun.” It’s an endurance challenge of 25 with too much of that time going towards repetition and foundational necessity. The ratio of gruntwork to delightful moments of discovery is out of balance. The UCS Millennium Falcon previously set a new benchmark for price, but I think that set provides a more luxury and rewarding build experience.
As a display set, it is impressive, but the “muchness” of it is another big ask. It’s unforgiving in how it’s oriented, impractical to move, and requires so much space. I can’t imagine building another set like this and setting them up together. It’s too big. Bring on the Star Wars city modulars, not this!
The biggest ask of all is the $1000 price tag. Sure, you can justify it by the weight of the plastic in those 9,000+ bricks. But despite the luxury of the price, it is ultimately an average feeling build. Throughout the lengthy build process, I was was seeing the compromises of scale more than the surprising moments that elevate construction into an artform.
Even in a post-capitalist society where any curious builder could have access to this set, regardless of cost, I would hesitate to recommend 75419 Death Star. It takes things I love and makes them exhausting.
LEGO Star Wars 75419 Death Star | 9023 Pieces | Available October 1 | US $999.99 | CAN $1299.99 | UK £899.99
I have a bad feeling about this…