Source: Global Times
After the new film "Blood Five" (pictured) directed by the famous American black director Spike Lee landed on the streaming platform Netflix on the 12th, word of mouth was polarized. In the film, sensitive racial issues constitute a paradox from an anti-war perspective, and also highlight the difficulty of American society on such issues.
"Blood Five" tells the story of 4 Black American Vietnam War veterans who return to the jungles of Vietnam in a realistic and historical interlude, hoping to find the remains of their former captain and a box of gold they buried in the local area. The "treasure hunt" did not go well, with black veterans encountering a series of accidents such as mines and ambushes. The squad leader played by "Black Panther" Chadwick Bosman, although he does not appear much in retro films of memories, is the "spiritual leader" of all black soldiers. As a "post-war" film, the plot is not complicated", "Blood Five" is more than two and a half hours long, and director Gein inserts a large number of documentary materials about the history of black Americans between war scenes and treasure hunts: from the trafficking of African Americans to the Americas in the 16th and 17th centuries to the affirmative action movement in the 1960s. The murder of Martin Luther King Jr. in Memphis in 1968 is recreated in the film through the Vietnamese "radio broadcast to black American soldiers", which triggers "Vietnamese and whites, who are the enemies?" The racial paradox also runs through the film. It is worth mentioning that the "Easter egg" at the end of the film is the surviving black veterans who use practical actions and funds to support the current "black lives are also lives" protests.
Spike Lee is one of the most famous Contemporary African-American filmmakers in the United States, who has dedicated himself to advocating for black rights on the screen for many years, and almost all of his works are to create "real black films". Back in 1989, Spike Lee's masterpiece "Do What You Should" was shortlisted for the Cannes Film Festival, and the film became internationally famous for its attention to the black community in Brooklyn, New York. Over the years, Spike Lee's work has been popular with the three major film festivals, with the 2016 Oscar awarding him a lifetime achievement award, and "Black Party" about "Black Detective Brave 3 Klux Klan" winning last year's Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay. In fact, Spike Lee has a lot of opinions about the "racial harmony" genre such as "Green Book" and white war films such as "First Blood", and even left the Oscar ceremony to protest. If not affected by the epidemic, Spike Lee would have been the chairman of the jury at the Cannes International Film Festival in May, the first time Cannes has invited an african American director to such an important position, and "The Oath of Blood Five" will have its usual world premiere in Cannes. Although the film does not have an offline premiere and box office, it is more convenient for more viewers and media to see the film on the streaming platform. On the professional film review website Metacritic, "Blood Five" received a high media score of 81 points, and the freshness of the Rotten Tomatoes website was as high as 92%. The Chicago Sun praised that "Lee created an immersive, violent and shocking scene, like a combination of Deer Hunter and Sands of Blood, with a hidden critique of American society and politics." The New Yorker points out, "This is a history lesson wrapped up in an adventure."
There are also media opinions with reservations. For example, the Globe and Mail believes that the film is "messy and sensational, and may not be the work that people expect to see, but this is the first cooperation between Lee and Netflix Big Data". The San Francisco Tribune simply said that "it's a clumsy combination: an adventure film set in Vietnam on one side and a racial manifesto in 2020 on the other, both sides trying to juggle but failing to deal with it." Given the current cautious attitude of the American media on the issue of race, the media ratings can only be used as a reference. In contrast, the user rating on metacritic was 6.2, and the audience index on Rotten Tomatoes dropped to 60%. A netizen message represents the true voice of many viewers, "The subject matter is very interesting, the intention is also very unique, but it is too long, procrastinating and stupid."