Spike Lee’s recent Netflix Vietnam War film Da 5 Bloods is deliberately and forthrightly anti-war. It includes footage of Martin Luther King Jr., Muhammad Ali, and Malcolm X trenchantly connecting the United States’ racism at home to imperialism abroad. Its soundtrack is centered on Marvin Gaye’s 1971 anti-war album What’s Going On. With deliberate didacticism, it points out that Black soldiers were drafted to fight in Vietnam at brutally disproportionate rates, and implicitly rebukes past films on the subject, from John Wayne and Ray Kellogg’s 1968 film The Green Berets to classics such as Francis Ford Coppola’s 1979 film Apocalypse Now, which center the experience of white soldiers.
Yet the movie’s heist plot is at variance with its anti-war themes. Four Black U.S. soldiers return to Vietnam decades after their service, and you are encouraged to cheer as they shoot anonymous Vietnamese gangsters while stealing Vietnamese gold. Even as it condemns U.S. involvement in Vietnam, the movie reflexively restages that conflict for the usual violent thrills. Lee’s anti-war and anti-racist commitments crumble before the firepower of the genre he’s working in.
