Netflix Reveals the Trailer for Spike Lee’s Da 5 Bloods

The first glimpse at Spike Lee’s new feature Da 5 Bloods is here, and it immediately claims our attention as every Spike Lee joint does. Da 5 Bloods sees the tirelessly inventive, always curious Lee delivering a Vietnam war movie, a caper, and a story of brotherhood all in one. Lee directed from a script he co-wrote with Paul De Meo, Danny Bilson, and Kevin Wilmott. Wilmott recently shared an Oscar with Lee fro co-writing their excellent BlacKkKlansman with fellow scribes Charlie Wachtel and David Rabinowitz. Da 5 Bloods looks like a possibly perfect mixture of Lee’s strengths and gives us perhaps something to look forward to as we head into a very uncertain summer season.

Da 5 Bloods follows four Vietnam war veterans returning to the country to search for the remains of their squad leader. That leader is played by Chadwick Boseman, and the scenes of Boseman and the four soldiers during the war are shot in a format that appealingly recalls films from the era, and iconic Vietnam films like Apolcalypse Now, which gets referenced here. The soldiers, as older men are played by Paul (Delroy Lindo), Otis (Clarke Peters), Eddie (Norm Lewis), and Melvin (Isiah Whitlock, Jr.,) return to Vietnam not only out of a profound sense of duty; they’ve also got treasure on their minds. During the war, they came upon a huge cachet of gold, and they buried it with the promise of coming back to retrieve the loot later.

The trailer sees Lee doing what he’s done so incredibly well over his career—take America’s brutal history of racial strife, and the political and social fallout from our collective refusal to face this history, and use it as fuel for narratives that play out on city streets (Do the Right Thing), in suburban basements (BlacKkKlansman), and now in the jungles of Vietnam. The trailer for Da 5 Bloods leaves no question who the filmmaker is—it could only be a Spike Lee joint—and it gives us a reason to look forward to June 12, even if in an ideal world we’d be watching this film in the theater.

Check out the trailer here:

Here’s the official synopsis from Netflix:

From Academy Award® Winner Spike Lee comes a New Joint: the story of four African-American Vets — Paul (Delroy Lindo), Otis (Clarke Peters), Eddie (Norm Lewis), and Melvin (Isiah Whitlock, Jr.) — who return to Vietnam. Searching for the remains of their fallen Squad Leader (Chadwick Boseman) and the promise of buried treasure, our heroes, joined by Paul’s concerned son (Jonathan Majors), battle forces of Man and Nature — while confronted by the lasting ravages of The Immorality of The Vietnam War.

Featured image: Key art for Spike Lee’s ‘Da 5 Bloods.’ Courtesy Netflix.