If the road to hell is paved with good intentions, then Netflix’s splashy new movie, “Munich: The Edge of War,” is about the freeway to the Third Reich. Everyone means almost painfully well, and yet the result is calamity. Its subject is the 1938 conference that confirmed Hitler’s seizure of Czech territory and set the stage for his conquest of Europe.

This is a superbly well-done movie, though a strange one, full of counterfactuals that change nothing. “Munich” takes liberties with history while refusing to fundamentally rewrite it. It is as if Quentin Tarantino’s “Inglourious Basterds” grew up, sold the motorcycle, stopped drinking, and took out a mortgage. It is fiction enough to be fun, and fact enough to be prestigious.

“Munich” is directed by Christian Schwochow, who cut his teeth on British period dramas by directing a handful of episodes of “The Crown.” Currently in a limited theatrical run, it begins its streaming life at the end of the month. The movie centers on 10 Downing Street rather than Buckingham Palace, but it shares much of the show’s gloss.

Mr. Schwochow’s movie is based on a novel by Robert Harris. The clothes and setting seem tailored by historians, but the characters are the work of a novelist. Jeremy Irons is magnificent as Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, and Ulrich Matthes, who in 2004 played Goebbels in the film “Downfall,” here gets a promotion to play Hitler himself, chillingly capturing the Führer’s mixture of menace, brutality, and insipidity.

The two central characters, apart from Chamberlain and Hitler, are almost too perfectly designed to be true. In the movie’s first scene, Paul Von Hartman (Jannis Niewöhner) and Hugh Legat (George MacKay, last seen running through the trenches in Sam Mendes’s “1917”), are cavorting at an Oxford bop in 1932, sharing champagne and cigarettes with Paul’s Jewish girlfriend Lenya (Liv Lisa Fries), who meets a predictable fate.

Paul is German and entranced by the new politics gaining steam at home, while Hugh is English and worried about the new fascist on the European block. Conveniently, Paul speaks English, and Hugh is studying German. A firework goes off, and it’s mostly metaphoric.

Fast forward six years, and the party is over for Paul and Hugh, along with everyone else. The movie shows Jewish Berliners scrubbing sidewalks with toothbrushes and graffiti that reads “Jews, go back to Jerusalem.” Fortunately, both Paul and Hugh are well-placed for this grim next chapter.

Hugh is Chamberlain’s private secretary, pulling late nights at the office while the great man smokes a seemingly endless sequence of cigars. Paul has a position proximate to power in the German Chancellery, close enough to the inner sanctum to perform Hitler’s daily press briefing on the train to Munich and even lend the Führer his wristwatch.

In the meantime, Paul has become a good German and a bad Nazi, actively working from within to bring Hitler down. These schemes are loosely modeled on the real-life Oster conspiracy, which comes to naught because they were counterintuitively dependent on Germany going to war in Czechoslovakia and provoking an English and American response, which would give Hitler’s generals cause to arrest and remove him from power.

Watching this possibility squandered, I felt a little bit like Carlton Fisk willing the ball fair in the 1975 World Series but knowing that it will always curve foul. Alas, Chamberlain’s well-known appeasement of Hitler at Munich renders that plan null and void by making Hitler’s aggression kosher rather than disqualifying.

It is here that the movie shoots its shot. Via his old buddy Hugh, Paul gets Chamberlain’s eyes on an internal German high command memo documenting Hitler’s plans for continental conquest. Chamberlain is unmoved: he is seeking to avoid war at all costs and believes that if war does come any delay to its onset will mean a more prepared England.

This line is bizarrely repeated in the movie’s credits — as if this sympathetic reading of Chamberlain’s intentions is incontrovertible historical fact and not a late-breaking and controversial argument for the defense after the verdict has already been rendered.

“Munich” clearly wants to give Chamberlain a makeover from blundering appeaser to savvy practitioner of realpolitik. In contrast to Paul and Hugh’s undergraduate impulsiveness and dewy-eyed earnestness, the movie suggests, Irons’s Chamberlain is a man well versed in the world’s ways.

The truth is that he failed to grasp the wisdom of the rabbis who said: “He who is compassionate to the cruel will eventually be cruel to the compassionate.” Chamberlain’s pennywise wisdom was but folly on the road to Auschwitz. Chamberlain thought he won the peace, but it was his successor Winston Churchill who would have to fight the war.

As I watched Munich, I thought about the edge of different wars, those of our own time that also feature men in suits negotiating in ballrooms, this time in not Munich but Vienna and Geneva. As talks grow ever more desperate over the nuclear weapons sought by the mullahs of Iran and over President Putin’s ambitions in Ukraine, Chamberlain’s lesson is due not for revision, but remembrance.