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.