It's unclear what Spielberg means by that juxtaposition. Is he making a blanket statement about the evils of retaliating against terrorists? Is he making the point that, in 1972, Americans felt safe from the kind of terrorism visited upon the Israelis in Munich, but it was really just a matter of time before we'd experience it for ourselves? Spielberg is too intelligent a filmmaker to trade in accidental images, but his meaning isn't at all clear here, and the World Trade Center is too loaded a symbol to use as indistinctly as Spielberg does.

Spielberg does so much right in "Munich" that it's disheartening when he goes wrong. In the finest scene in the movie, Avner is invited out to the French countryside to meet Louis' father, known only as Papa (he's played, wonderfully, by Michael Lonsdale). The scene is so beautifully staged -- and so subtle in the way it gets at the link between patriotic duty and the importance of family, even in the face of immoral acts -- that it sets a standard the rest of the movie doesn't quite live up to.

And there are bigger problems: The picture opens with a swift primer on the Munich hostage massacre, blending news footage with filmed re-creations of the events. It's a stunning sequence, a compact way of both laying down essential details for the audience and making them feel the horror of the murders. But through the course of the movie, Spielberg revisits the murders in flashback, filling them in with increasingly more graphic detail. In the movie's most egregious scene, Spielberg intercuts shots of the hostages being murdered with Avner making love to his wife -- this may be Spielberg's clumsy way of affirming that the political is personal, but it's a case where, I think, Spielberg is cheapening and trivializing tragedy. (I also wonder how the graphic depiction of the murders must look to the surviving members of the hostages' families. Exploring the needlessness of violence by showing violence is all well and good, but perhaps not at the expense of people who have already suffered so greatly from it.)

"Munich" is both astonishing and frustrating. It's not easy to tell how much of the tone comes directly from Spielberg and how much comes from Kushner, who was called in to polish the script after Roth completed it. But it appears that both want to force some kind of satisfying resolution onto these very tricky moral issues. And although this picture is a world apart from Spielberg's atrocious, small-spirited "War of the Worlds," in some ways both movies speak to Spielberg's inability to wrestle with the potential justifiability of violence. In "War of the Worlds," the U.S. military shows up, in all its bravado, to fight the giant aliens with its tanks and guns. But in the end -- an ending straight out of the H.G. Wells source material -- lowly bacteria are what prove to be the aliens' undoing. Violence is bad, it's ineffective -- and luckily, with bacteria around to do all the dirty work, it doesn't have to be effective.

Violence isn't the answer, Spielberg tells us in "Munich." But the artists and filmmakers who are fondest of that handy platitude are never able to tell us what the answer is, particularly in cases involving terrorist acts, acts that generally exist outside the context of sane moral reasoning. Diplomacy, obviously, is a much more civil and ethical way of solving disputes than violence is. But if terrorists were responsive to diplomacy, we'd have to call them by another name. And "Munich" doesn't begin to consider the differences between the terrorists of '72, fighting for the concrete goal of a Palestinian state, and contemporary Islamic terrorists fighting for the amorphous goal of an Islamist paradise on Earth.

By the end of "Munich," when Avner has finally begun to question what he's done in the name of his country and his religion, we may find we've forgotten one of the saddest and most revelatory moments of the movie's beginning: Early in the picture, we see Golda Meir (played by Lynn Cohen) deliberating, with her cabinet, whether to take action against those who enabled the Black September terrorists. She paraphrases the climax of Hannah Arendt's "Eichmann in Jerusalem." And then, her voice clouded with weary resignation, she says, "These people -- they've sworn to destroy us. Forget peace. We have to show them we're strong." There's no rah-rah nationalism in her stance, or in her voice. Spielberg stages the moment to make it clear that this was a decision made with reluctance, not self-righteous certainty. "Munich" is fascinating when Spielberg gives himself the latitude to work in these shades of gray, but their shadowy uncertainty is hardly comforting. No wonder he prefers the resolute hopefulness of black and white.

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