"Black Lives Matter Meets Jesus and the Vietnam War"

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What You Need To Know:
DA 5 BLOODS is a strange hybrid. It’s a war movie, a heist thriller, a political drama, and sometimes a documentary that mentions little bits of Black History, from Director Sike Lee’s leftist viewpoint. This mixture doesn’t always work, but the movie has its compelling, suspenseful and even touching moments. Sadly, the movie has a strong Romantic, Anti-American, politically correct, leftist worldview with extreme violence and nearly constant foul language. This negative content in DA 5 BLOODS is mitigated, however, by a clear presentation of the Gospel of Jesus Christ and elements of repentance, forgiveness, love, and reconciliation.
Content:
More Detail:
DA 5 BLOODS is a strange but compelling and sometimes touching hybrid thriller, created by Spike Lee, about a group of black Vietnam War vets who go to present day Vietnam to recover the body of their war buddy and millions of dollars in gold bars. The themes in DA 5 BLOODS are as hybrid as the story, with ideas ranging from the oppression of black people in America to PTSD, the power of greed and the need for repentance and forgiveness. These themes are mixed with extreme violence, nearly constant foul language, strong Anti-American, politically correct content, and an overt reference to the Gospel, among other content.
The movie opens with newsreel footage from the 1960s and 1970s, including footage of black soldiers fighting in the Vietnam War. Also included in the footage are quotes condemning racism in America from Black Muslim Malcolm X, boxer Muhammed Ali (also a Black Muslim), Black Panther Party founder Bobby Seale, and communist radical Angela Davis. A photo of five black soldiers in the jungles of Vietnam ends the sequence.
Cut to present day Vietnam, in a hotel lobby in Ho Chi Minh City. Four of the five soldiers, now pushing 65, meet up after not seeing one another for many years. A mudslide has uncovered the area where they buried their squad leader, Norman, who died during a mission. They hope the mudslide has also uncovered the place where they buried millions of dollars in gold bars that the CIA had intended to pay local villagers for their help in fighting the North Vietnamese Army and the Viet Cong, the communist guerrilla fighters and terrorists employed by North Vietnam’s communist leaders of North Vietnam. Led by Norman, the men had agreed to tell their superiors that communist soldiers had gotten to the gold before they got to the shipment, which was on a crashed transport plane. However, enemy soldiers engaged the men in a gunfight, during which Norman was shot dead. After he died, the men promised each other to return to Norman’s body and the buried treasure later, but then American troops were pulled out of Vietnam.
Now, the men intend to travel into the jungle, retrieve the gold and identify Norman’s body for an American team recovering bodies from the war. One of them has contacted an old girlfriend, who’s put the men in touch with a shady Frenchman who can exchange the gold for cash money.
Of course, things don’t go according to plan. The son of one of the men shows up and blackmails his father to go on the trip. Eventually, the four ex-soldiers and the son run into a group of armed men led by the revenge-seeking son of a killed Viet Cong soldier who plans on killing them and taking the gold.
DA 5 BLOODS is a strange hybrid. It’s a war movie. It’s a heist thriller. It’s a political drama. And, sometimes it’s a documentary that mentions little bits of Black History, from Director Sike Lee’s leftist viewpoint. This mixture doesn’t always work, partly because it includes flashbacks to the five men’s relationship with their mentor and squad leader, Norman, as well as a couple scenes where one of the men imagines himself talking to his dead war buddy. The movie’s little leftist documentary asides don’t help. They were obviously tacked on to the original script. Despite this, DA 5 BLOODS holds the viewer’s interest. It has its compelling, suspenseful and even touching moments. However, it does run a little long, about two and one-half hours.
The movie’s themes are as hybrid as the story. Among the topics depicted are the oppression of black people in America, the effects of PTSD or Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome on American war veterans, the power of greed, the nature of revenge, and the need for repentance and forgiveness. Into these themes, Director Spike Lee, who also co-wrote the final script, inserts a Romantic, Anti-American, politically correct worldview, including references to the violent Marxist/Racist terror group Black Lives Matter. All the five men’s problems are laid at the foot of white, capitalist American culture and society. Finally, the movie falsely claims that black soldiers were used as cannon fodder by white officers and were killed at a much higher rate than white soldiers, but figures from the Department of Defense and elsewhere show this isn’t true (see David Horowitz, “The Truth – The Number of Black US Soldiers Killed in Vietnam,” FrontPage Magazine, Nov. 26, 2001, https://rense.com/general17/thetruththenumber.htm).
Despite the movie’s leftist politics, DA 5 BLOODS has some positive Christian content. For example, although the men’s mentor and squad leader, Norman, seems to teach his men Marxist theories about racial oppression in America, he also talks with them about God and Jesus. Tellingly, however, Norman also gives the men a reductive economic theory of war, just like any other useful Marxist stooge. Later in the movie, Paul, the most disturbed member of “Da 5 Bloods,” who also just happens to be a hateful Trump supporter, has a mental breakdown because of a terrible secret that’s haunted him since the Vietnam War. During this breakdown, he imagines he’s talking to Norman, who forgives him for his transgression. After this scene, Paul sings a hymn to the armed group led by the son of the dead Viet Cong soldier, who have captured him, “God is my friend. Jesus is my friend. He made this world for us to live in and gave us everything. All he asks of us is we give each other love. Jesus loves us, and He’ll forgive us all our sins.”
Thus, at one point, DA 5 BLOODS delivers a clear presentation of the Gospel. It also promotes repentance, forgiveness and love, including a man saying, “God is love. Love is God.” However, at the same time, the movie expresses hate for America. For instance, in that same scene mentioned above, Paul tells his captors that he and his buddies fought in an “immoral” war for “rights they didn’t have.” The whole movie stresses this Neo-Marxist lie, that blacks in America have never really had any rights in the United States. Even the flashbacks showing the four men’s interaction with their squad leaders stresses this lie, several years after the United States Congress passed the 1965 Civil Rights Act, several years after black actor Sidney Poitier won the Oscar for LILIES OF THE FIELD and more than 100 years after slavery was banned in America. Blacks always had at least some rights in the United States, even under slavery and terrible segregation laws. During the 1960s, segregation laws were banned and blacks gained full rights under the Civil Rights Act. During all of that history, more and more blacks exercised their rights to worship as they see fit, to speak freely, to own guns, to travel across state lines, and to achieve the American Dream. What Marxists and leftists like Spike Lee and the leaders of the Marxist terror group “Black Lives Matter” don’t want to tell you is that the deprivation of some rights in some places doesn’t mean that a person has no rights at all anywhere.
To Spike’s credit, however, DA 5 BLOODS does mention the boat people who tried to escape tyrannical Communist Vietnam in the 1970s. It also mentions that communists in Cambodia murdered more than a million people. What the movie doesn’t do, though, is link this deadly communist oppression to the withdrawal of American troops from Southeast Asia and the American government’s refusal to give any more money to freedom fighters in Southeast Asia trying to stop these communist tyrants and murderers.
DA 5 BLOODS also contains extreme violence, including bloody point blank shootings, and nearly constant foul language.
DA 5 BLOODS is known as the last movie filmed by late actor Chadwick Boseman, who died at age 43 of colon cancer. Boseman does a great job, as does veteran actor Delroy Lindo, who delivers a masterful performance as the troubled Paul.