Is Francois Truffaut right? Can there ever be a movie that is truly anti-war?

There is, and it’s the Star Wars prequels.

“There is no such thing as an anti-war film,” a quote attributed to Francois Truffaut, encapsulates the conundrum of inadvertently glorifying war whenever it is presented. The more terrifying and horribly it is presented, the more a purportedly anti-war movie would feel like a recruitment film.

The de-humanizing first and second halves of Full Metal Jacket do not intend to paint a flattering picture of army life. Yet, abusive drill sergeant R. Lee Ermey is a folk hero, and a “thousand-yard stare” has come to signify bad-assery, rather than an unwashable stain on one’s soul. The action meant to simulate the dread and misery of war instead becomes riveting and addictive.

This is not so with the three movies that comprise George Lucas’ Star Wars prequels. War is not made out to be exciting or heroic, but dull, pointless, and a chump’s game. True, it makes for terrible cinema and storytelling, but perhaps that is the price that must be paid to undo the romanticism and righteous mythology of the original trilogy.

There is scarcely anything denoting the moral high ground of the heroes in the prequels. The Jedi council is composed of easily manipulated clowns (whereas Yoda’s backwards speech in the original trilogy serves as a charming mask through which wisdom is doled out in judicious and well-timed lumps, here Yoda just seems plain stupid), who are pushed towards war, not by any tangibly noble causes, but by arcane intergalactic trade conflicts orchestrated to consolidate power into the hands of the Emperor, who is oddly the most charismatic character in the whole trilogy, and the only one with a clear sense of purpose about who he is and what he is doing. As the audience, we do not. Why the hell are they fighting? Shrug.

We are meant to root for Anakin before his turn to the Dark Side, but he remains an uncharismatic dipshit all throughout, such that there is scarcely any appreciable difference between the braided Paduwan and the corrupted “youngling” killer. (Full Metal Jacket, for all its unflinching gaze at the horrors of war, never showed its soldiers as literal baby killers.) Obi-Wan in particular has the demeanor of an irritated bureaucrat. Amidala is the leader of a nation-state that discriminates against the sea-dwellers that share their planet, and yet elects the most incompetent among them as token representation in a galactic congress. These are our heroes, and these are the causes we are meant to support.

With the exception of the aforementioned idiot Jedi generals, the bulk of the conflict is fought by clones or robots, thus robbing the viewer of any sense of investment. In its stead, the viewer is left with a growing sense that unfathomable sums of money have been wasted to create the colorful, yet surprisingly dull melee of senseless and overly complicated action onscreen, as if to mirror the sheer waste of human capital and productivity when applied to actual warfare.