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Munich is all about "Munich." Not the place, or even the event forever associated with the place—the taking and killing of Israeli hostages by the pro-Palestinian group Black September at the 1972 Olympic Games. It is, instead, about the profound and shifting meaning the city's name took on afterwards: for survivors, historians and avengers who tried to make sense of such violence by mourning, writing or exacting retribution for it.

The illegibility of that violence makes the first minutes of Steven Spielberg's film harrowing and enthralling. The assailants are daunted by the fence surrounding the Olympic Village when a crew of American athletes, returning late from a night out, help them over. So innocent, so unknowing—the fact that these track-suited naifs are Americans can only remind you of how much the world has changed in 30 years.

And yet, it's much the same. During Black September's assault, the camera bangs from frightened faces to bloody splatters to horrified TV viewers. ABC's Jim McKay narrates as best he can, getting facts wrong, watching a ski-masked terrorist cock his head on the balcony. The experience is so instantly overmediated and sensational, no one knows what to do.

When the hostages are all killed at the airport, the Israelis decide to strike back, using "counterterrorist" tactics. Spielberg's film tracks (and fictionalizes) the assassinations that follow, carried out by a team simultaneously assembled and disavowed by Prime Minister Golda Meir (Lynn Cohen). In the face of such calculated horrors, sustained and excruciatingly public, she asserts, "Every civilization finds it necessary to negotiate compromises with its own values."

Compromise is the dilemma for Avner (Eric Bana), the Mossad agent and Meir's sometime bodyguard who leads the team. Acting in the name of righteousness, he leaves behind his pregnant wife (who serves mainly as the image of "home," ripe, lovely and trusting) and mother (who believes in the end and doesn't want to know the means). The fact that Avner's famous military father is dead, and his domestic front is represented as a trio of women—wife, mother and Meir—makes his work seem gallantly grounded in a national preservation rather than incessant aggression.

At the same time, his primary Israeli contact is Ephraim (Geoffrey Rush), who is dedicated to revenge as a declaration of selfhood. It is this imperative that Avner comes to question as he travels across Europe with his motley team. Early scenes show the core group—eager Steve (Daniel Craig), toymaker-turned-bombmaker Robert (Mathieu Kassovitz), antiquarian Hans (Hanns Zischler) and avuncular military vet Carl (Ciaran Hinds)—bonding in earnest, friendly discussion and bread-breaking. It's a typical Spielberg move to grant the men emotional stakes in one another (c.f. Jaws or Jurassic Park) before they embark on their traumatic labors, resulting in the undoing of their bonds and idealism.

Beautifully shot by Janusz Kaminski, Munich is laced with suspenseful set pieces, including the child-in-danger number (a target's daughter answers a phone rigged with a bomb), the revelation-of-costs number (when a bomb explodes in a hotel, Avner sees the resulting fear, even beyond the target's bloody remnants), and the father-figure number, in which an ideologically neutral and frankly menacing French contact called only "Papa" (Michael Lonsdale) supplies the group with target locations but also sells information about them to the highest bidder.

When Papa observes, "The world has been rough with you, with your tribe," Avner doesn't see the repetition of the pattern, the impossibility of protecting his family by violence. Later, when Papa arranges for the team to hide out in the same safe house as a Palestinian group, Avner and Ali (Omar Metwally) discuss the differences in their missions: "You don't know what it's like; you have a home to go back to," insists the nationless Ali. Avner agrees but also worries: "Home is everything."

Home, tribe, family—these are the values by which Avner measures his duty. And yet, Munich contends, the efforts to define home by endless cycles of aggression can never succeed. Avner's icy, masculine resolve gives way to guilt and angst, leading to a tragic, Coppola-esque set piece, Avner's sex with his wife intercut with a flashback of the murders of the Israelis at the airport, their abject faces completely unanswered by the revenge he's been wreaking. Increasingly paranoid that the Israelis must kill him to keep their part in the murders secret, Avner meets with Ephraim against a backdrop of the twin towers. Ephraim assures him, "You killed them for Munich… for the future… for peace." None of these terms means what it once did.

Munich Directed by Steven Spielberg, A Universal release, Opens Friday at Ritz Five