This is not a Tom Cruise movie, nor is it a Meryl Streep movie and it's barely a Robert Redford movie. Frankly, Lions for Lambs is barely a "movie" at all and if you wish to enjoy it you mustn't think of it as such, let alone a blockbuster movie. L4L is best savoured as a pseudo-documentary, not quite like Inconvenient Truth, though not that far away either.

In fact, the film could really be named Inconvenient Talk or Inconvenient Topics, as it's really about, well, talking about tough topics with no clear consensus view - in politics, in education, in media about the role of America and Americans in the war on terror, in the classroom, in public knowledge, in government, as minorities, as the privileged and so on.

You've got Robert Redford, a professor trying to convince possibly his brightest student that there's more to life than just earning degrees and growing rich. His take on crises like the Iraqi war, possibly echoing Redford's personal view, is that the younger generation can't sit back and blame the hopeless politicians. The people of America have got to do something, although two other students of his take the view to (what he views as) an extreme position by actualling signing up to fight.

These two students - a Puerto Rican and Negro - also form the other key segment of the show, a snow-battle in the mountains of Afghanistan resulting from a very poorly planned US military op. This fiasco was in turn the brainchild of Senator Jasper Irving, played with boyish gusto by Tom Cruise, the poster child of American Republican politics who says all the right things and ducks most of the tough questions, and does both with a huge grin. Irving invites Meryl Streep's character, a journalist, to do an exclusive on the new military strategy and in the process engages in a tense debate on the failures and futures of American foreign policy in the context of the war on terror.

L4L is all about the arguments. Back forth back forth - it's one big plurivocal textbook played out in motion picturesque.

Should Americans be indifferent, should they apologise, should they curse the politicians (those who never say anything but never stop talking, and who keep repeating that, "I am NOT running for President") and ignore them, or should they take an active role which may involve sacrificing 'the good life' (of good colleges, high salaries and big walls)?

Should the United States pull its troops out of Iraq and Afghanistan and risk "a shattered Iraq, a hopeless Afghanistan and a nuclear Iran"? Or should America continue to put their boys in the firing line, up the tempo and seek to annihilate the rebel forces and the 'Tali' (ban - get it?) once and for all? Are good and brave Americans who enlist for military action being stupid and throwing their futures away, like lions led by lambs? Or would it be better to seek alternative routes of engagement, until one is drafted into the army?

Can one disagree with another's patriotic actions whilst revering the other's reasons for them? (Can, in fact, motives and actions be so neatly separated?)

So you have professors, wise monkeys, counselling young lions not to be led to the slaughter by lambs like the Senators, themselves challenged by elephant-journalists with large memories - whilst the entire jungle is in crisis.

Welcome to the circus of life. There are animals everywhere and no one's really sure what's happening, but everyone's hoping there'll be a happy ending. Before we all tear each other apart, limb from bloody limb.