
Date: 8/22/2020
Viewed: Netflix
First viewing
Note: I have been excited to see this movie ever since it was first announced. Spike Lee made a great comeback with BlacKkKlansman (2018) in my opinion because I felt like his movies after 2006 started to drop in quality. I finally had the time to sit down and watch it on Netflix today. After watching it for the first time, I really enjoy it. I don't think it is Spike Lee's best movie, but I still consider it to be a solid movie nevertheless.
Da 5 Bloods is a very good movie that deals with greed, racism, and anti-war. Watching this movie felt like that I was watching a mixture between The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948), Apocalypse Now (1979), Do the Right Thing (1989), and Three Kings (1999). The acting and dialogue are top-notch in my opinion. I can't think of a single bad performance in this movie and I hope that Delroy Lindo gets an Oscar nomination. I do love the great cast of characters that Spike Lee created for the movie because he did a wonderful job giving them their own personalities. Every character in this movie is pretty likable, and they do feel like real-life people. You get to see the relationships and the conflicts that these characters went through during the Vietnam War.
I just love how you can really feel the bonds that these characters have and you start to feel upset when something bad happens to them (without spoiling too much of the movie). The movie's message about how war is about money is spot on too. You also get fantastic cinematography from Newton Thomas Sigel, and he did a fantastic job of making the colors in this movie really pop out. It was really neat how the movie switches from 16mm during the 1970s to the movie being shot digitally in the modern-day. The 16mm scenes almost feel like they filmed it in the 1970s. I was also surprised that they used de-aging technology for the flashback scenes on the actors because I didn't know that they did after the movie was over. It did felt convincing that they hired younger actors during the flashbacks. The ending in this movie is wonderful because it will punch you in the gut.
If I had to pick one thing that I didn't like about the movie is the pacing. This movie is too long and I felt like it could have been 2 hours at max. The movie also started to feel disjointed during the middle act of the movie in my opinion. Overall, Da 5 Bloods is a great movie and it is worth checking out.