Spike Lee: Marching against the unjust powers that be, with strong words for President Trump

Spike Lee has given us war films his whole moviemaking life, wherever the stories take him — overseas in officially sanctioned conflict or, more often, to the streets on the home front, where the clashes take on different and often competing labels: race riot. Civil disobedience. Rebellion. “A kind of war,” as our president said the other day, describing post-George Floyd America in 2020.

Streaming on Netflix Friday, “Da 5 Bloods” is director/co-writer Lee’s 24th narrative feature, the first being his hour-long New York University thesis project, “Joe’s Bed-Stuy Barbershop: We Cut Heads,” back in 1983. With direct homages to, among other films he admires, “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre” and “Apocalypse Now,” the two-and-half-hour “gumbo” (Lee’s description) tells of four African-American veterans whose comrade, played by Chadwick Boseman, was killed under fire in Vietnam in 1971.

“Da 5 Bloods” toggles between past and present. Nearly 50 years after their last tour of duty, the surviving friends reunite in modern-day Vietnam for two missions: to recover the remains of their fallen comrade, and to retrieve a fortune in CIA-funded gold intended for the Vietnamese government but discovered and then stashed away by the Bloods in the mountainous jungle terrain.

Delroy Lindo, a frequent Lee collaborator, heads the ensemble as the most anguished of the vets, coping uneasily with PTSD and joined mid-story by his estranged Black Studies professor son played by Jonathan Majors (“The Last Black Man in San Francisco”). The rest of the Bloods are portrayed by Clarke Peters, Isiah Whitlock Jr. and Norm Lewis. The initial screenplay by Danny Bilsonand Paul De Meo dealt with white veterans returning to Vietnam. It was then rewritten top to bottom by director Lee and screenwriter Kevin Willmott, collaborators on the controversial Chicago-filmed 2015 project “Chi-Raq” and the Oscar-winning hit “BlacKkKlansman” (2018).

https://www.msn.com/en-us/movies/news/spike-lee-interview-marching-against-the-unjust-powers-that-be-with-strong-words-for-president-trump/ar-BB158vNt