Steven Spielberg has incited the same debates and controversies each and every time he has “gotten serious,” and despite two Oscars for directing, mountains of critical acclaim, and very public denunciations by the likes of Jean-Luc Godard and Claude Lanzmann, the question remains: How do we deal with one of the most talented filmmakers who's ever lived taking on projects that are too ambitious for any filmmaker to succeed at them fully? It’s all too easy to be dazzled by the filmmaking, to be overwhelmed by set pieces like the liquidation of the Krakow ghetto or the Omaha beach sequence, to invoke the thousand astonishing trees in declaring each new forest a masterpiece. It’s just as easy, though, to deplore the arrogance and the ambition ­ to pronounce that whatever ground Spielberg is working on isn’t an appropriate site for said forest in the first place, and to dismiss the accomplishments of films like Schindler’s List and Saving Private Ryan out of hand. By now, most audiences, and certainly most critics, approach each new film with a preordained point-of-view; they are bashers or admirers, and nothing’s likely to sway that opinion. For those of us who remain agnostic on the question Spielberg, who see him neither as antichrist nor as messiah, the issue becomes more difficult with each new film, as Spielberg's obvious talent seems to stand increasingly in opposition to his obvious overreach.

To put matters another way, Spielberg isn’t the sort of filmmaker one has quibbles about. For those who object to Schindler’s List, the problem isn’t just, say, the Auschwitz gas chamber sequence. The problem is the very concept itself ­ the reduction of historical trauma to film genre ­ as it is enacted in that sequence, through the manipulation of genocide to the ends of filmic suspense and melodramatic relief. Typically, one doesn’t object to a decision here or a decision there but to the application of the conventional tools of entertainment to material that deserves something more sophisticated and more solemn. In the case of his latest film, whatever Munich’s apparent stylistic and political breaks from the “serious Spielberg” oeuvre, Spielberg’s political thriller is just as susceptible to these objections as any of its predecessors, even as it seems to explode the built-in tensions between genre and politics, between entertainment and history.

The first thing that needs to be said about Munich is that its erudite, sophisticated, and thoughtful screenplay, written by Tony Kushner and Eric Roth, based on George Jonas’s book Vengeance, does an improbably remarkable job of toeing the line between political complexity and emotional clarity, that it never once seems either reductive or didactic despite taking on arguably the most fraught political conflict of the past half century. The second thing that needs to be said about Munich is that it suffers from some near-fatal structural problems: a somewhat obvious episodic narrative that takes far too long to get to its inevitable conclusion, an interesting use of flashback that culminates in a disastrous (literal) climax, severely compromising the film’s last half hour, and, most importantly, an unrelenting reliance on the thriller form to achieve its politically and intellectually loaded effect. As a consequence, the film needs to play strictly by the rules of the thriller in order to undermine our expectations and question our allegiances; it’s a dangerous and, I fear, not altogether successful proposition.

Munich’s protagonist, Avner (Eric Bana), a former Mossad agent, is a sort of Jewish Everyman-cum-Superman, a polite and soft-spoken father-to-be with talent in the kitchen, a body that’s to die for, and a killer smile. Avner’s an image of an image, no less an idealized construction than Viggo Mortensen’s Tom Stall in A History of Violence. Indeed, Violenceand Munich share far more than a passing similarity. But where the Cronenberg film functions largely as an ur-text, using its generic conceits to subvert the very desires the thriller entices, Spielberg’s film is too entrenched in real conflict to locate its appeal or critique in purely hypothetical or generic terms. Sure, we sympathize with Avner because we’re conditioned to, filmically, and our sympathies are upended by the brutal and harrowing filmic approach to the consequences of Avner’s actions, but there is a real conflict at this film’s center.

Munich approaches this conflict ­ terrorism in the Middle East ­ only obliquely, much as Schindler’s List approaches the Holocaust or Saving Private Ryan World War II or Amistad American slavery. Like those films, Munich tackles historical trauma through indirect means, privileging the exception to illuminate the context. It tells the story of a five-man unit, led by Avner and commissioned by the Israeli government to covertly and unofficially assassinate the Palestinian masterminds behind the abduction and eventual murder of eleven Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics. The film examines a project of counter-terrorism and retaliation. At first, the assassinations come swiftly and satisfyingly. With time, the costs become dearer, the operations more tenuous, and the psychological devastation irrevocable. All the while, though, Munich remains resolutely focused on the response to terrorism and on the effects of violence, and not on terrorism itself or its root causes; terrorism is context, justification, flashback.

The film is about the thrill of the hunt and the consequences of the kill; it pays only passing, albeit thoughtful, lip service to Israel, Palestine, and terror. That these historical and political realities become the literal return of the repressed here is unavoidable, but by relegating them to that position, Spielberg never fully grapples with the contradictions he lays out so compellingly. Though Munich’s resolute refusal to take a stand in the conflict is unquestionably admirable, it nevertheless falls into a betwixt and between that proves all too easy to praise aesthetically and impossible to sustain intellectually. As it draws to its precarious close, Munich attempts to establish continuities between its thinly elaborated past and our own fraught present. It even ends with an image clearly meant to drive the analogy home, but Munich’s last shot also exposes its impotence and its hubris.

So what are we left with? All this, and I’ve mostly talked around the film, hardly mentioning a single detail. That’s precisely the point, I suppose. It should come as no surprise that Munich is stupendously well made ­ beautifully shot, thoughtfully assembled, well acted. It should also come as no surprise that there are some questionable decisions throughout, including the aforementioned sex scene and an unfortunately elaborate Hitchockian set piece involving a telephone bomb and a charming young girl. Munich rises and falls on issues far more fundamental and opaque than these, though: Does its approach to the conflict work? Is it an appropriate way to get at what it’s trying to get at? Is it even possible, or advisable, to make a sophisticated film on violence in the Middle East without acknowledging a political agenda? Like a good Spielberg agnostic, I answer: 1941 sucks, and Jaws is a masterpiece. Case closed.