Spike Lee made a real "black movie" again, and it was also a collaboration with Netflix to broadcast it online. Long before it was officially launched, da 5 Bloods had a freshness rating of over 90% on Rotten Tomatoes. Released at this juncture, the theme of the film undoubtedly resonates violently with reality. This film is likely to become the new blockbuster black film after "Black Panther".
After the launch of "Blood Five", the current Rotten Tomatoes freshness rate is 91%, and the audience score is 75%;
The IMDB score was only 6.6, but MTC was as high as 82 points.
Spike Lee's films always revolve around the topic of black people, which has a profound embodiment of black habits and social dilemmas. This time, "The Oath of Blood Five" presents the lasting damage of the Vietnam War to the black community in the United States from a black perspective.
When racial issues meet the trauma of the Vietnam War, "The Blood Five" can be seen as a "black version" of Apocalypse now.
Spike Lee also pays a direct tribute to "apocalypse now" in the film, giving its name in a bar.
Four veterans of the Vietnam War returned to Vietnam years later and reunited at a bar called "apocalypse now" to discuss how to start a "life", retrieve the body of the dead captain ("Black Panther" Chadwick Bosman), and search for a chest of gold buried by the five of them together.
Judging from the historical background and character construction of "The Oath of Blood Five", Spike Lee's ambitions are obviously greater than his last film, "The Black Party".
If more than 40 years ago, "Apocalypse Now", directed by the "Godfather Group" Coppola and starring Marlon Brando, showed the spiritual distortion of the Vietnam War for whites, then this "Oath of Blood Five" is a cry after Spike Lee borrowed the issue of war, interrogated the topic of race, and used the film to connect history and present, fiction and reality.
The title of the film is "The Oath of Blood Five", but only four people returned to Vietnam many years later. Their former captain and spiritual leader, Norman, has long been buried in the jungles of the Vietnam War.
The four reunite in Vietnam years later, partly to search for the captain's body and return to his hometown, and on the other hand, to find gold buried many years ago to improve their lives. The film changes the format and tone several times, allowing the main story to travel between the past and the present. The memoirs recount the five people's experience of finding and disposing of it, and finally reveals the deepest hidden foreshadowing, the true cause of Norman's death.
Norman seems to be the spiritual sustenance of the four people, but in fact, it is more like a war wandering soul that they cannot get rid of. The film is not very fast-paced, and the four of them take up a lot of time in the film before they return to the jungle to carry out the search.
Spike Lee sacrificed a sense of rhythm and entertainment to portray four black characters in a profound and rich way. Especially Paul, with severe post-war trauma, the team's think tank Otis. The two are basically the real male protagonists of the whole film, and the four of them begin the search with different purposes, and carry out the second "Vietnam War" in their lives.
The originally arranged mission, because of the mistaken entry of a group into the minefield, and the betrayal of the French, plus the four brothers were seduced by gold, constantly encountered various crises, resulting in the fragmentation of friendship and the loss of many lives.
The four are willing to return to the "battlefield" in order to repair the scars left by the war, face the self that was missing due to the Vietnam War, and find a complete humanity. The functionality of those second-level characters is very obvious, Otis has a Vietnamese girlfriend, and Paul has a son who is not very well connected. Love and affection have been devastated by war, and even though they have long since left the battlefield, they cannot return to their ordinary and peaceful ordinary lives.
In the end, some people die of despair of friendship, and some people die of suspicion and guilt. Taken together, they were all plagued by demons in their hearts, and after their bodies left the war, their souls were lost here. For them, returning to the battlefield, Ma Ge's body can be wrapped in order to retrieve the soul that has been lost for many years. Just like Melvin in the foursome, although he has been away from the battlefield for many years, after seeing the enemy throw a grenade, he will still be the first to cover the grenade that will explode with his body, sacrifice himself, and minimize the damage that the grenade will cause to others.
If Norman symbolizes the trauma of war on their hearts, then gold is a sign of war on their physical and material scarcity. Although the black community gave many lives for the Vietnam War, after the war, racial issues still plagued the United States. Their sacrifices were not justly rewarded.
When the four find the gold, some of them happily almost forget the body of Norman, some of them forget their past promises, and their greed for money also proves that their material life is not satisfactory.
The dead captain Norman, the four who survived, all served their country, but it seems that the United States did not give them the respect and reward they deserved. In the end, they can only rob the gold that has been forgotten by the state, distribute it equally, and improve their lives for themselves and their families, the implication of which is self-evident.
There's no doubt that Blood Five is a very political film. Spike Lee did not hesitate to sacrifice the smoothness of the narrative and put many socially significant black members into the film in the form of interludes.
At the end of the film, with Martin Luther King's Speech as the end, the film's performance of the issue of race in the United States can be described as unremitting efforts. Spike Lee's logic of expression is clear. Martin Luther King, Jr. opposed the war, but was shot by the Assassins the following year. As a result, blacks became the main force in the Vietnam War, becoming the most sacrificed group of people in the United States.
Black people deserve respect, black lives matter, and the blm movement scrapes from the film into reality. Spike Lee is not a prophet, but racial issues, like the Vietnam War, have been a thorn in the hearts of the American people and have not been removed for a long time.
It is worth mentioning that "The Oath of Blood Five" also has some French and Vietnamese with obvious metaphorical effects. In the film, the cunning French take the Vietnamese and try to kill people and swallow gold. But Spike Lee also constructed a set of good-natured French and Vietnamese figures.
The Vietnamese tour guide was also deeply hurt by the war, which he believed had divided his family and led to a long-standing hatred and hostility within the country. The rich second generation of French beauties, who gave up a comfortable life, atone for their families to get rich by squeezing the Vietnamese, did volunteer mine sweeping work. Finally, a mine clearance and rescue organization was established with the gold they received, hoping to purify the French of their original sin against the Vietnamese.
These character designs actually embody Spike Lee's desire to transcend color and make all beings equal. Regardless of color, ethnicity, race, or gender, every individual should be respected. Everyone's life should be valued.
Only by transcending the values of skin color can a system of true equality be established. Unfortunately, after the Vietnam War, the battlefield of blacks shifted from Vietnam to the United States, and even if they lived in their "homes", they needed to use violence to protect themselves and use elections to fight for fairness and justice.
Unfortunately, more than 40 years after the release of Apocalypse Now, white people did not bring progress and light to the world's most "multicolored" land, as they themselves advertised, but instead broke free from the shackles of social norms from the civilized world and found their primitive, violent and greedy selves.
Fortunately, the development of science and technology, the loopholes of the system, are also being exploited by people of color, whether in the movie, or in reality, a change is happening.
Like the title of Apocalypse Now, apocalypse now.