Da Five Bloods (2020)

Wow, this is a difficult movie to watch. On some level it starts out as a love letter to a fallen comrade, and an attempt to recapture a youth lost as soldiers in Vietnam. On another level it is about greed and the power of money in general and gold in particular to corrupt. It is a combination of Apocalypse Now and The Treasure of Sierra Madre, so close that there are deliberate references and imagery from both movies. Then there is the irony that these black American soldiers were fighting for something that they themselves did not have in their home country--freedoms that they lacked because of the color of their skin. The other irony that we can see much better from the distance of years is that we were of course fighting on the wrong side all along, that the protection of the colonialist French who exploited the country and it's workers had far less to offer the people of Vietnam than the brutal colonialists, and in the end we just left, providing little in the way of an exit strategy for those who supported the South Vietnam war effort. All of this sounds complicated and it is, but in the hands of Spike Lee we are guided through it. He even manages to bring in the current civil rights movement, Black Lives Matter, and weaves that deftly into the take home message. The story is that a band of five black soldiers, led by Norman (Chadwick Boseman, in his last role), leaned upon each other to survive. Norman is killed in action, at the sight of a helicopter crash where they find a trunk full of gold. They bury both the gold and Norman with the intention of coming back some day to retrieve them both. That is the mission they embark on, and it turns out about as well as you would guess. Very powerful, a 1/2 hour too long, and do not skip over it. Lee always has something worth listening to to say.