Yeah, this is pretentious. And what makes it worse is that in all of it's art house pomp, it doesn't come across so much as anti-war as it does anti- stopping the Japanese and Germans from their genocidal bid for world domination.
It was like they were saying that they are devoutly on the left... so much so that they support the axis powers if only because the alternative is the United States and Democracy and that is somehow more... fascist(?).
I don't know, the film suffers from schizophrenia and the message gets lost when you realize that it's a World War II story and not a Vietnam story and that it is kind of taking the wrong side of WWII in it's effort to call America a fascist nation.
But, you get pointless meandering diatribes and A-list actors in a horrible movie.
The good news is that it looks pretty... but I don't think the final product is what the writer of this and From Here to Eternity had in mind.