From the very opening moments of Spike Lee’s epic new Vietnam chronicle, Da 5 Bloods, it’s clear where the film’s heart lies. The movie, which is streaming on Netflix, opens the way Lee’s films have more often tended to close: with a montage. With an overdose of history and all its back-and-forths, all its cyclical, structural ironies, injustices, and discontents.
Perhaps inevitably, it all starts with Muhammad Ali, an outspoken voice of Black discontent during the Vietnam era if ever there were one. Before even a credit sequence, we open cold with Ali, excerpted from a 1978 interview, saying: “My conscience won’t let me go shoot my brother, or some darker people, or some poor hungry people in the mud, for big powerful America.” Ali, laying it all bare, continues: “And shoot them for what? They never called me nigger. They never lynched me. They didn’t put no dogs on me. They didn’t rob me of my nationality.”
Cue Marvin Gaye’s timeless, mournful “Inner City Blues (Makes Me Wanna Holler),” with its ferocious lamentation of the long-running roundelay of America’s use and abuse of black lives and black capital: “Rockets, moon shots / Spend it on the have nots / Money, we make it / 'Fore we see it you take it.” Cue, as well, a stirring forward-march of news and documentary footage from the era, images which—it is impossible not to notice—are primarily focused on the war’s many black GIs, on the one hand, and the casualties wrought on legions of Vietnamese, on the other. The Vietnamese who, to echo Ali, never lynched or disenfranchised those black GIs, never put them or their ancestors in chains, and never, until the Vietnam war, rose to the occasion of being an “enemy.”
The enemy, Lee’s montage more than implies, was back home. And so before the story of Da 5 Bloods kicks off, we’re also forced to reckon with images of the war being fought on American turf, the protests, the hoses, the shootings, the police. And the speeches: Nixon, Johnson, Bobby Seales, Angela Davis, Malcolm X. We see those familiar but still fresh and newly relevant images from atrocities like the Kent State massacre—defamiliarized, in Lee’s hands, by his appending the names and faces of each casualty onto the photographs. Lee heightens it all: Eddie Adams’s unbearable photograph of the execution of Nguyễn Văn Lém—a bullet to the head that, once seen, cannot be unseen—cascades into the NBC video footage of that event. And Black GIs, alongside their white countrymen, hustle and struggle against that morally and topographically unfamiliar turf. Gaye, his voice as despairing as it is beautiful, steeps us in the rage of it all.
It’s a cold open that deftly summarizes the political monstrosity that was the Vietnam war. Thus it becomes all the more powerful for Da 5 Bloods to emerge as the story that it does. This is a movie about four Black Vietnam veterans on a mission back to Vietnam, back into those horrors, to recover something owed to them. They are there to find and recover the body of a fallen comrade, the fifth Blood, and bring him home. But they are also there to retrieve the cache of U.S. minted gold they’d found all those years ago—gold intended for the Vietnamese indigenous assisting the Americans in their wayward fight. Gold that, for these men, has all the sparkling qualities of long-overdue reparations.
Da 5 Bloods stars Delroy Lindo, Clarke Peters, Norm Lewis, and Isiah Whitlock Jr. as the extant members of the titular squad. And it stars Chadwick Boseman as the man who was lost: Stormin’ Norman, their old squad leader, dead out there in those hills but very much alive in mens’ hearts—and nightmares. Da 5 Bloods is a sprawling film, a two hour and 35-minute collage of memories, arguments, motivations, and even visual styles; Lee leaps between four different aspect ratios to capture the competing elements of the story. There are ghosts. There are eerie revelations of who these men have become since Vietnam.
And there is extraordinary violence—violence you ought to expect, given that this is a movie about Vietnam that wears its nods to films like Apocalypse Now on its sleeves, but don’t see coming because of when and where it happens. There are still landmines in those Vietnamese hills, you see. And for all the ways that the film notes the extent to which Vietnam has, like these Black veterans, modernized and grown with the times, again as for these veterans, the country’s wounds remain alive, fresh. The war extends into, fully exists within, the present.
You know as much from the flashbacks to the mens’ stint in the war, in which the actors—rather than being de-aged or replaced by 20-somethings—play their younger selves. These flashbacks are not “memories" with the benefit of retrospect or distance, but living history, inseparable from the Bloods’ present-day selves. Lindo, a towering actor whose previous work in Lee’s films (Crooklyn, Clockers) is as fearsome as it is extraordinary, is wearing a Make America Great Again hat. He’s a Black Trump voter, a veteran whose persistent anger over what America owes him, whose extraordinary xenophobia, have rendered him into what many of us probably think is a walking paradox. Yet I know this man: I am related to, practically grew up with, a Black Vietnam veteran whose traumas have resulted in precisely this: a pervading anger in search of a target, a hatred for the world born of having been thrown to the wolves by a country that still had yet to consider him one of its countrymen. The rootlessness of that, the injustice of it, give you men like this.
In so many ways, Da 5 Bloods is your classic Lee affair: a straightforward plot pleasurably encumbered in a lot of freewheeling talk and debate and personality. The story and the cast keep growing and expanding outward, not always satisfyingly, sometimes outright ludicrously, but in ways that always feel alive and alert to the men this movie is about and their eerie, frequently sad, complexities. All the issues are here: opioids, paternal secrets, interracial romance, PTSD, financial ruin. Jonathan Majors, so excellent in last year’s The Last Black Man in San Francisco, eventually shows up to play David, the son of Lindo’s Paul, to whom his relationship is necessarily tortured. Mélanie Thierry, Jasper Pääkkönen, and the wonderful Paul Walter Hauser play a trio of mine detonators reckoning with their own colonial conscience. Veronica Ngo, meanwhile, gives us Lee’s vision of Hanoi Hannah; she’s the one who drops the bomb that Martin Luther King, Jr. has been killed.
That these veterans all fall into conflict with not only each other, but their contemporary Vietnamese counterparts, as well as their own pasts, feels inevitable. The memory of Stormin’ Norman already summarizes so much of that conflict. He was, as they say, their Martin and their Malcolm: two men whose philosophies, to even the present day, are often depicted as in conflict with each other (as every MLK-inspired call to cease rioting that I’ve seen over the last two weeks has unfortunately reminded me). Even when the men reach the gold there remains the question of what to do with it—what’s fair. Should they keep it for themselves? Should they, adhering to Stormin’ Norman’s vision and in deference to his legacy, use it to invest in Black liberation? I remain stuck on Muhammad Ali’s opening words. “They”—the Vietnamese—“didn’t rob me of my nationality.” How do you restore someone’s faith in an enemy that is their own country?
What I didn’t expect—what kept me committed to Da 5 Bloods even as, at times, its looseness risked dulling what proves so fiery and strange about it—was that it would make me so sad. I think I have Lindo, especially, to blame for that. What a face. What anger. Real ones already knew what he was capable of, of course. But Da 5 Bloods gives him more room. It offers moments in which, going increasingly mad, he addresses the camera straight on, in pursuit of something that from the way it’s filmed feels like us. He is indisputably our Captain Kurtz, which, given the Trump hat, makes the performance feel that much more electric. Just look at the vocabulary of his anger: the slyness, the wryness, the perma-resistance to our pity that winds up inciting exactly that. It’s a career-high in a career full of them. And Lee’s film more than lives up to it.
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