Da 5 Bloods (2020) on Netflix
Four African-American Vietnam veterans return to Vietnam to recover their fallen leader's remains and buried gold. Paul's son David joins them as a French businessman offers help.
- Netflix3.9/5
- IMDb6.5/1057,946 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes92%
Trailer
Plot summary
During the Vietnam War, five U.S. soldiers known as the Bloods recover a crate of CIA gold bars and bury it, but their leader Norman is killed in combat and napalm hides the spot. Decades later, the four surviving members, Paul, Otis, Eddie, and Melvin, reunite in Ho Chi Minh City after a landslide uncovers the plane wreckage. Otis meets his former girlfriend Tiên, who tells him he has a grown child. Tiên introduces them to Desroche, a French businessman who offers to help smuggle the gold out. Paul's son David arrives and joins the group. They hire a tour guide, Vinh, and head into the countryside to find the gold and Norman's remains.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Da 5 Bloods (2020)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Samuel L. Jackson, Denzel Washington, Giancarlo Esposito and John David Washington were all initially cast in the lead roles of Da 5 Bloods but dropped out because of scheduling conflicts.
- Instead of de-aging technology or make-up, Spike Lee had his main cast, most of them in their 60s, play their own 20-year-old selves in the Vietnam flashbacks, which he felt showed that the aged characters remain trapped in their wartime memories.
- The film began as a 2013 spec script by Danny Bilson and Paul De Meo titled The Last Tour, which Oliver Stone was set to direct; Spike Lee and Kevin Willmott rewrote it, shifting it to an African-American perspective and expanding the Stormin' Norman role.
- The ruins standing in for the Mỹ Sơn temples in the film's action sequence were a set the crew built itself from wood and Styrofoam over two months.
- Da 5 Bloods uses four aspect ratios to separate its eras, with the 1960s flashbacks shot in 1.33:1 on 16 mm film to mimic newsreel footage, an idea cinematographer Newton Thomas Sigel proposed; Netflix executives resisted, but Lee was adamant and allowed to proceed.
- The film features six songs from Marvin Gaye's 1971 album What's Going On; composer Terence Blanchard said the record captured what was going on in the country and becomes extremely powerful when Spike Lee puts that music in a film.
