The Last Jedi was terrific

I thought Star Wars: The Last Jedi was one of the best movies of the series. I know there are a lot of die-hard Star Wars fans who don't like many parts of the movie. But I really liked that I was fooled so many times by the story. I thought I had things figured out but was pleasantly surprised by what happened.

The action scenes were riveting and as we saw with other recent movies of the series, you couldn't be sure that everyone you've been rooting for will make it out alive. I liked that the main characters did not make flawless and correct decisions all the time. This movie seemed the most real to me. All the other movies in the series have this inevitable quality to them. There will be twists and turns but in the end, all the lead characters will make the right decisions and everything will turn out OK. It doesn't here. Even heroes are scared. Even the wisest make bad decisions from time to time.

One pivotal scene made a big impression on me. While Luke had chosen an extremely remote and hard-to-find world for his self-imposed exile, it wasn't a completely random choice. There is a Jedi temple there. The first Jedi temple containing the original, ancient texts of the Jedi Order. And Luke, after an agonizing realization, is about to destroy them. And the ghost of Yoda comes along and Luke expects him to stop him - but he doesn't! Yoda actually burns them saying no one reads them anymore anyway. They know what they said. Just keeping them around in the isolated location does nothing. It's a courageous decision but it's not like keeping those texts around help the Jedi Order. They were down to the their last two already and by the end end of the movie, they are down to their last Jedi.