SPIKE LEE’S new Netflix film Da 5 Bloods, dealing with the after-effects on African-American soldiers of the Vietnam War, opens spectacularly.

A documentary sequence begins with Muhammad Ali detailing why he chooses not to fight: “My conscience won’t let me go shoot my brother or some darker people… for big powerful America… for what? They never lynched me, they didn’t put no dogs on me. They never robbed me of my nationality.”

Malcolm X explains the war as a continuation of a history of black exploitation in a country where “20 million black people fight all your wars and pick all your cotton, and [you] never give them any recompense.”

Over contrasting shots of the war and the 1960s protests against it come the strains of Marvin Gaye’s Inner City Blues, where the singer plaintively pleads for an end to a system where, while “bills pile up sky high,” the response of a supremacist government is to “send that boy off to die.”

The film also concludes strongly in the present, featuring the Black Lives Matter protests, which echo again Marvin Gaye’s still-prescient words about “trigger-happy policing.”

In between, unfortunately, things get a lot muddier.

In the fiction, the four soldiers return to Vietnam to recover a treasure trove of gold they had hidden during the war. Each, and especially Paul (Delroy Lindo), has been in some way damaged and traumatised by the conflict.

Vietnam is now a prosperous country — a sex worker under the US regime is, under an independent Vietnam, a financial broker. But for these ex-soldiers, their return invokes painful memories.
 
The film self-consciously highlights the idiocy of the Rambo myth, where Sylvester Stallone returns to fight the war and this time wins it. Yet Lee's film falls into a similar trap as it recycles classical Hollywood images with the racist and imperialist residue of those images still intact.

Lee channels Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now and its soundtrack of Wagner's Flight of the Valkyries as the five travel upriver to find the gold. This is the least offensive of the references, because the original was cognisant of the lunacy of the war.  

Paul, wracked by guilt over what happened in battle, grows increasingly mad as they travel further upriver, suggesting that, like Brando’s character Colonel Walter E Kurtz in Apocalypse Now, he’s suffering from PTSD. He’s not innately mad but driven so by war.   

Elsewhere, though, the references are not so innocuous. There are echoes of Treasure of Sierra Madre in the way in which the thirst for the gold divides the “bloods” and there’s a direct reference in one scene that reconfigures the Vietnamese as Sierra Madre’s scurrilous Mexicans.
   
The film cannot acknowledge that the Vietnam war was won by the Viet Cong, freedom fighters whose struggle against US imperialism is the same struggle that African-Americans are engaged in domestically today in the inner cities.

Thus one character, who can’t stop refighting the war, is executed in a scene depicting the Vietnamese as bloodthirsty bandits.

The only male Vietnamese character the “bloods” trust is a bounty hunter whose parents fought for the US puppet government of South Vietnam. A flashback to the 1960s battlefield continues the “othering” of the Vietnamese by showing them only in outline, a device criticised as being detrimental to Oliver Stone’s much better film Platoon.

Ultimately, Da 5 Bloods positions itself within the traditions of the Hollywood war films and westerns, complete with the bloods in a campfire scene — surrounded by hostile Indians/Vietnamese? — which inevitably must end in a battle.

This one features the bloods and their European NGO allies against Jean Reno’s bloated Frenchman and, again, the nearly faceless Vietnamese are simply enlisted behind him in a way that suggests nothing has changed in Vietnam since the French were driven out in 1954.

With heavy casualties, the bloods win the battle and, in a way, the Vietnam war. We’ve come both a long way — and not very far at all — from Rambo.