I've recently finished watching my favorite Star Trek series, Deep Space Nine. I think what made that series so great was the presence of war. Some of the greatest films of all time feature war in one form or another as a prominent backdrop, be they Saving Private Ryan, Braveheart, and Lord of the Rings. Victor Hugo featured war as a backdrop to Les Miserables and Leo Tolstoy's famous work War and Peace, also featured war as a backdrop. And of course, here we are on a site about films called Star Wars. Why does war make for such compelling story telling and drama?

The quandary lies in that war is such a horrible thing, yet is also necessary on occasion. Imagine a world where we stayed out of WWII because we wanted peace so badly that we refused to fight for it and I'll show you a world where we have no freedom and liberty to pursue our dreams. While I'm at it, I'll show you a world where you can be killed because you dislike or disagree with the governing authority. Even today, there are people living here who know that very reality. They live in fear subject to tyrannical dictators who show a cruelty on par with the Sith.

And this is why the famous song that according to Seinfeld was to be the original title for War and Peace is wrong. Good things can come from war. War was what helped free the American colonies from the British crown. War is what expedited the end of slavery. War is what helped liberate Europe from Nazi Germany. The Western victory in the Cold War is what helped liberate Eastern Europe from Communist tyranny. If we do not defeat the terrorists in the War on Terror, then we will live under the oppression of tyrants who demand that everyone follow a certain relligion and that women do not get an education. As much as we wish we lived in a peaceful world, our world does not yet know peace.

Most people take their basic liberties for granted. We don't know how much they really mean to us until they are threatened. And that is why war makes for such compelling stories. In a war story, we see people whose basic liberties are taken away from them or they are oppressed. In Star Wars, the galaxy lives in fear of Palpatine's tyranny. If you don't do what I say, I will hurt you. I will destroy your life. I'll blow your planet up just to prove a point. War stories make for compelling drama because they hit close to home. Darth Sidious may be fictitious, but real life is full of HItler, Stalin, bin Laden, Castro, the so-called President of Iran, and a host of other tyrannical dictators. Some of us may have been personally been affected by such tyranny, or perhaps we've met someone who survived such a horror.

That is why war stories hit so close to home. In Star Wars, we see characters fighting for ideas and beliefs similar to ours. Remember that the original films were released in a time when people rightly feared the advance of tyrannical Communism. When President Reagan's SDI project was derisively dubbed Star Wars, Reagan responded by saying that he didn't mind since Star Wars was a story about people who believed in freedom and liberty fighting against an Empire that wanted to take away freedom. War works as an effective backdrop for a story because it provides a threat to an idea, whether that idea be freedom, love, or oftentimes both. Because of the immediate danger in which war places our heroes(especially true in Star Trek and Star Wars because we've gotten acquainted with the heroes beforehand), I think we become more emotionally invested in their survival. As many have mentioned, we knew that Anakin was going to become Darth Vader, yet we find ourselves pleading with him not to do what we already know he is going to do.

I also think the immediate presence of war is what makes the classic trilogy films more compelling than the prequel films. In the prequels, we already know the ending. We see threats of the coming danger first, but it doesn't become more personal until later. These characters live in a world unlike anything we encounter in our day to day lives. The galactic civil war brings the characters closer to home because we see them facing threats and responding to dangerous situations that we can fathom on some level as some of these threats are seen today in the world in which we live. We wonder if we would be able to act like Luke or Leia. Would we have a conscience like Chewie and persuade others to join in the rightness of our cause? Suddenly, the characters become more than people on a screen. They become ideas we care about. In some sense, they become what we believe in and so we begin to care deeply about their fate, hoping that in our own internal struggles we too can emerge victorious.