Da 5 Bloods has a film with a lot to say about the Black experience in war, and even then it's not a film that feels exclusively for a Black audience.
It's a war film about four Vietnam veterans (played by character actors Norm Lewis, Delroy Lindo, Clark Peters, and Isiah Whitlock Jr.) who return to the war zone years later to recover some lost goal. Joining them is one of the soldiers' sons (Jonothan Majors) who acts as an audience surrogate. There's an aura of celebration like friends at a reunion, but come on, this is a war movie: The façade is quickly broken by revelations of post-war economic hardship and PTSD.
Like Platoon, Bridge on the River Kwai, or Apocalypse Now, this film turns tragic as the crew is immersed into psychologically and physically hellish situations. The main actor, Paul (Delroy Lindo in what might be an Oscar-bait part), loses his mind, and survival is far from guaranteed for any of them.
Perhaps, this is even more tragic than those other films in that these veterans have been through this before; it was clearly a difficult experience (as evidenced by the haunting of the 5th blood); and they decided to undergo a mission through the Vietnamese jungle again. Were they misinformed about how much those jungles would be guarded by Vietnamese and mercenaries? Were they deluding themselves into thinking this would be easy? Maybe the tragic reality (and subtle economic commentary) is that they needed the gold that badly.
Either way, getting invested in these people's lives means you will be hit by the senseless of how it ends, but that's par for the course of a war movie. In other words, it's an affecting film and a rich one.
It's a war film about four Vietnam veterans (played by character actors Norm Lewis, Delroy Lindo, Clark Peters, and Isiah Whitlock Jr.) who return to the war zone years later to recover some lost goal. Joining them is one of the soldiers' sons (Jonothan Majors) who acts as an audience surrogate. There's an aura of celebration like friends at a reunion, but come on, this is a war movie: The façade is quickly broken by revelations of post-war economic hardship and PTSD.
Like Platoon, Bridge on the River Kwai, or Apocalypse Now, this film turns tragic as the crew is immersed into psychologically and physically hellish situations. The main actor, Paul (Delroy Lindo in what might be an Oscar-bait part), loses his mind, and survival is far from guaranteed for any of them.
Perhaps, this is even more tragic than those other films in that these veterans have been through this before; it was clearly a difficult experience (as evidenced by the haunting of the 5th blood); and they decided to undergo a mission through the Vietnamese jungle again. Were they misinformed about how much those jungles would be guarded by Vietnamese and mercenaries? Were they deluding themselves into thinking this would be easy? Maybe the tragic reality (and subtle economic commentary) is that they needed the gold that badly.
Either way, getting invested in these people's lives means you will be hit by the senseless of how it ends, but that's par for the course of a war movie. In other words, it's an affecting film and a rich one.