Spike Lee’s ‘Da 5 Bloods’ Is One of the Greatest War Movies Of All Time

Warning: This article contains spoilers for Da 5 Bloods on Netflix.

There’s a character in Spike Lee‘s Da 5 Bloods whose job is to locate and detonate old landmines in modern-day Vietnam.

“Landmines, planted years ago, and still harvesting death, all these years later,” Hedy (Mélanie Thierry) muses. It’s casual banter said over drinks. She’s flirting with David (Jonathan Majors), an American who’s visiting the country with his veteran father. But it’s also a metaphor for one of the film’s major themes.

Plenty of war movies have grappled with the horrifying, destructive reality of war, but few have dug so deeply—or so meaningfully—into how that destruction doesn’t end when the troops are sent home. Few have shown the way that trauma—from racism, from death, from committing unspeakable acts for a country that oppressed you—manifests into continued violence for generations. That’s what makes Da 5 Bloods, which debuted on Netflix on Friday, one of the best war movies of all time.

When veteran soldiers Paul (Delroy Lindo), Otis (Clarke Peters), Eddie (Norm Lewis), and Melvin (Isiah Whitlock Jr.)—”the Bloods”— first arrive in Vietnam, they treat it like a vacation. They go out dancing, they go out for drinks, they go out on a riverboat for a guided tour. The war is over. There are painful memories, sure, but the flashbacks featuring their fallen comrade Norman (Chadwick Boseman) are romanticized and distant. Shown in a lower definition and 4:3 aspect ratio, they feel a bit like catching Apocalypse Now on TV. (Lee explicitly even references the Francis Ford Coppola film by playing Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries” as the men venture down the river with their guide.) For the first half of the film, these memories remain firmly in the past.

This is not to say that these men don’t see how the war shaped their future. Paul has held onto an anti-foreigner sentiment that led him to vote for Trump. His son David lets us know that Paul has untreated PTSD, and we see the way his trauma manifests into aggression toward a pushy Vietnam vendor, which becomes a shouting match, which becomes Paul having a panic attack. We sense that Paul will have to process his painful memories, but we still think it’s possible to do so while leaving the “real” war in 1975.

Making the most of his luxurious two hours and 35-minute runtime, Lee lulls us into a false sense of security that this is not, in fact, a war movie—it’s a treasure hunt adventure movie. It’s The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, another film Lee explicitly references. (“We don’t need no stinkin’ official badges.”) We learn that the men are here not just for Norman’s remains, but for the gold bars he found and buried somewhere in the jungle. And guess what? They find the treasure. For a moment, there is pure joy. Then Eddie steps on a landmine.

In the film’s most horrific scene, Lee doesn’t let his audience look away from the violence and gore. This death, Lee insists, is not heroic. It’s not beautiful. It’s not comfortable. It’s a senseless, agonizing, gruesome death, like so many deaths in the Vietnam war were. And, just as the soldiers who survived the war had to do, we are forced to sit and watch it happen.

After Eddie’s death, everything gets real bad, real fast. Paul’s PTSD is no longer just an inner demon, it’s a key factor in a never-ending cycle of violence, and it’s dangerous. The Anti-American sentiment from Vietnam soldiers who attack our heroes for their gold is backed by years of American imperialism and murder.  For the Bloods, the inability to simply let go of the money is backed by years of systemic racism that has forced them to give and give and give for nothing in return. (Including fighting a war for a country that murders their people and their leaders.) Suddenly, as both sides openly fire on each other in the year 2020, the “real” war is back. Or rather, it never ended. It was all the real war.

With the exception of Jean Reno’s character, a shady French businessman who double-crosses the Bloods, everyone’s violence is, if not justified, then at least understood. But it’s not glorified. There is no patriotism; no military-funded love for the red, white, and blue. It’s just deeply sad and incredibly infuriating. It leaves you feeling righteously, murderously angry at the government who so thoughtlessly ruined the lives of these men and their children. It’s the kind anger that makes you want to take to the streets and start a different kind of war, proving that Lee is always speaking to the present even when he’s talking about the past. Da 5 Bloods is a war movie that gets to the truth of war: all-encompassing, neverending immorality.

Watch Da 5 Bloods on Netflix