Uli Edel's big-budget terrorism flick The Baader-Meinhof Complex has generated a sharp controversy in its director's native Germany. It deals with a traumatic period of history that German society has yet to come to terms with, and which has often been mythologised at both ends of the political spectrum.

Despite Edel's declared intention of destroying the mystique that has often surrounded the Red Army Faction (RAF) and its offshoots, his film has been accused of terrorist hero-worship and dishonouring their victims.

Such criticisms are unfair to one of the better films on the subject of Germany's terrorist emergency. The Baader-Meinhof Complex is not without flaws; it is thin on individual characterisation and sometimes relies so heavily on a cascade of violent setpieces to drive the narrative forward that there is little space for ideas and analysis.

The film brilliantly depicts the tit-for-tat dynamic of terrorist emergencies

It is nevertheless an important film for various reasons. First of all it is a meticulous reconstruction of the period it describes, whose authenticity owes much to the collaboration of Stefan Aust, a former journalistic colleague of Ulrike Meinhof and the author of the best historical accounts of the group.

The film captures the RAF's infatuation with revolutionary violence, their political incoherence and rage, their blinkered narcissism and their contempt for anyone on the left who criticised their doomed and bloody attempt to turn the staid West Germany of the 1970s into a Latin American style 'urban guerrilla' front.

Without glamorising its protagonists in the slightest, it shows how Baader, Ensslin and co could appear glamorous to each other and to the radical middle-class subculture that to some extent supported their actions and provided them with a constituency.

Where the film succeeds brilliantly is in its cold but objective depiction of the morbid tit-for-tat dynamic that so often underpins terrorist emergencies, in which the actions of the state and its enemies each contribute to an escalating spiral of violence and cruelty.

Edel and Aust take pains to establish the political context in which this deadly duel emerged. The early scenes of German police and Iranian secret servicemen savagely attacking a peaceful demonstration against the Shah and shooting one of the crowd dead; the attempted assassination of the student union leader Rudi Dutschke, the beatings administered to a future terrorist at a juvenile reform centre, are as shocking and brutal as any scenes in the film.

These scenes establish a context that is often missing from conventional representations of terrorism, whether fictional or 'real'. Whether it is the Red Army Faction, the IRA or al-Qaeda, terrorists tend to be portrayed in ways that suit the propaganda requirements of the governments that are fighting them.

Cinema so often attributes terrorism to the psychopathic evil of its protagonists

Such representations tend to obscure or deny the political context or motivations that give rise to such groups, so that their actions seem inexplicable and even insane to the general public. Cinematic depictions of terrorism similarly rely on thrilleresque caricatures which attribute the whole phenomenon to the warped psychologies or psychopathic evil of its protagonists.

Such stereotypes may provide suitably killable objects for the recreational violence of action movies and video games, but they generally cast more heat than light on the subject of terrorism itself. Edel and Aust take a very different approach. Without in any way suggesting that the actions of Baader and co were legitimate or justifiable in themselves, their film shows them as human beings and political actors with tactics, objectives and motivations that can be rationally understood - if not agreed with.

The film makes a forceful argument that terrorism cannot be understood without looking honestly at the way its protagonists perceive themselves. That may not seem like an astounding revelation, but it is a perspective that was rarely present when the RAF first emerged and which has been sadly absent in the good-versus-evil fantasy world of the War on Terror.