Really great. But first—
It’s so, so messy; scenes come one after another with little connective tissue. There are a few places when it hard cuts in the middle of a powerful moment (and an important story beat) to something unrelated (usually basic narrative padding), then cuts back, while also hard cutting the audio which makes it all the more jarring. It’s kind of part of Lee’s style, but it doesn’t always work here. Although I did recognize it being used very purposefully in the third act when a certain character begins hallucinating. And now that I’m thinking about it, there was also a PTSD-esque moment in the first thirty or so minutes that used a jarring cut to great effect. So maybe the overall style was completely coordinated to make us be in the headspace of these returning vets—just didn’t jive with me during my first watch. Could change my mind. Certainly, I’ll never understand why Lee’s team picked that atrocious font for the captions and subtitles. Okay, I get capitalizing every word. Spike does it on his Instagram (for whatever reason), but really that’s the font you pick? And did you have to highlight the word “gold” in yellow? I mean, come on.
But despite the editorial issues, this stands as a solid entry in the Spike canon. Fantastic, fantastic performance from Delroy Lindo who I personally was completely unaware of, but wow. One of his big scenes is a signature Lee talking to the camera as we dolly/Steadicam backward, so you know it’s good.
Much better than Scorsese’s flaccid attempt last year at portraying regret, aging, etc etc. Plus you get the bonus commentary on race and the war in Vietnam, and it’s an hour shorter! Wish Da 5 Bloods had gotten the theater release that had, but you couldn’t have asked for a more relevant release date than right now.
Spike’s Field of Dreams. I cried twice.
Note: I’m a sucker for mixing formats (in this case super-8, super-16, super-35, 35mm stills, archival analog video, and super-clean 35mm/65mm digital), so consider my review very biased.