Spike Lee goes to Vietnam in the psychedelic trailer for Netflix's Da 5 Bloods

“Let me tell you a story,” Spike Lee recently told Vanity Fair. “The United States Armed Forces came close to being torn apart when black soldiers heard that Dr. [Martin Luther] King was assassinated. They also heard that their brothers and sisters were tearing shit up in over 100 cities across America. The tipping point came very close; the black soldiers were getting ready to set it off in Vietnam—and not against the Vietcong either.”

This is key context for Lee’s Da 5 Bloods, a new film from the BlacKkKlansman filmmaker that stars Delroy Lindo, Clarke Peters, Norm Lewis, and Isiah Whitlock, Jr. as veterans of the Vietnam War who return to the country 50 years later in search of the remains of their fallen squadron leader. Black Panther’s Chadwick Boseman stars as that soldier in flashbacks, which are then intercut with, as Vanity Fair puts it, “interstitial cutaways highlighting a history of black valor seldom taught in schools.”