Why Spike Lee refused to de-age his stars in his Vietnam war drama

Entertainment · Published 3 October 2026 Swipe more like this →

In short: In Da 5 Bloods, four aging veterans return to Vietnam to recover buried gold and their fallen leader. Rather than using digital de-aging technology, director Spike Lee cast his older actors to play their younger selves, a deliberate choice to show how the past remains trapped within their present-day memories.

Released by Netflix in 2020, Da 5 Bloods follows a group of black U.S. Army veterans who return to Southeast Asia to find gold they hid during the Vietnam War. The project began as a 2013 script titled The Last Tour, which Spike Lee later reworked with Kevin Willmott to center on an African-American perspective. Lee drew inspiration from Wallace Terry’s 1984 book documenting the experiences of black soldiers in the conflict, which he required his cast to read.

The film is notable for its unconventional visual language. Lee utilized four distinct aspect ratios to distinguish between time periods and locations, including 16mm film for 1960s flashbacks to mimic period newsreels. Most strikingly, the main actors, mostly in their 60s, played their 20-year-old counterparts without digital enhancement. Lee argued that this visual dissonance effectively captured the characters' inability to escape their wartime trauma, as they literally see themselves as they were decades ago.

Critical reception was largely positive, with the film holding a 92% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Critics praised the performances of Delroy Lindo and Chadwick Boseman, as well as the film's ambitious, if sometimes erratic, blend of social critique and genre thrills. However, some commentators, including Viet Thanh Nguyen, noted that the film still struggled to fully disentangle itself from American-centric tropes, occasionally reducing the Vietnamese people to supporting roles in a drama defined by the American racial divide.

Despite its complex structure, the film achieved significant reach, with Netflix reporting 27 million household views by July 2020. It remains a polarizing but essential work, lauded for its urgent energy and its attempt to confront the intersection of racism and warfare. By the end, the narrative shifts toward catharsis, linking the veterans' personal journey to contemporary movements like Black Lives Matter, cementing its status as a sprawling, messy, and deeply felt piece of cinema.

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