Da 5 Bloods (2020)

Spike Lee has never been one to pull punches and with Da 5 Bloods he maintains that reputation. His film about Vietnam vets returning to that country to find something they left behind starts off bold, throwing history at us with newsreel footage reminding us of the context of an era, especially the way Black Americans experienced it. And from the that start he shows us a complicated, difficult, and anything but monolithic experience of black American soldiers and the Vietnamese people themselves.

Vietnam war movies have somewhat fallen out of fashion but Da 5 Bloods feels like a bit of a glorious return for the genre. Lee does a wonderful job oscillating between the present day and the past, filming the former with a glowing but gritty warm tone of resignation and redemption while the latter is made with a sepia toned nostalgia that brings both a remembered history and one that is revealing. In doing so he has painted a full picture of the toll of the war in ways Hollywood hasn't often focused.

War films are at their best when they explore how conflict and violence impact the humans involved. Da 5 Bloods does that both in the heart of battle and in the legacy, decades and lifetimes later. I think what most surprised me is the way he was able to have the Vietnamese experience bleed into his story. He is telling a story of black Americans and it's not his place to tell the asian perspective but he finds ways of seeing the intersections in moments.

Lee has his characters face their own demons. It would have been easy to make his characters 2 dimensional stand ins for their various perspectives but in a master like Lee's hands, they become something far richer and more honest. There are difficult, complicated politics that Lee embraces and makes us reckon with as his characters do.  He doesn't let us look away from it. But he plays this all out in intensely personal, lovely, funny, and tragic stories. The best part is how compelling these stories are. Da 5 Bloods is nothing if it isn't entertaining and it is a damn engaging adventure.

I love some of Lee's references, like playing Ride of the Valkyries as they sail down the river in a boat, like a big middle finger to well... so much. The flashes of photos, from Aretha to X and King, grounding us in everything that is needed to understand each moment. The way he captures the rage and conflicted feelings of African American soldiers so powerfully. These touches are uniquely Le, something that another film maker wouldn't do.Lee continues to do some of his best work and I hope he doesn't stop.

Da 5 Bloods
Starring: Delroy Lindo, Jonathan Majors, Clarke Peters, Norm Lewis, Isiah Whitlock Jr., Chadwick Boseman, Jean Reno, Le Y Lan, Melanie Thierry
Director: Spike Lee
Writers: Danny Bilson, Paul De Meo, Kevin Willmott, Spike Lee