Slow start and very preachy but it grew on me

Rating: 6/10 (13 June 2020)

I'm expecting to be preached to since it's Spike Lee but wasn't prepared in the bluntness of the messaging, I almost felt like I was being told I'm too stupid to know that African people have achieved things. Despite that it does work but it sets the tone of the film early on and gives it a comedic/less serious vibe and since I was expecting something deeper and more centered around the conflict perhaps it disappointed me in that respect. Once I got in to the rhythm of the movie I could accept it for what it is.
Overall I think it's a missed opportunity to show a deeper Vietnam war story and get the audience to understand further about what it was like to be an African-American in Vietnam during the 1960s. The action scenes are very comedic and Hollywood-esqe so there's no tension there. Chadwick Boseman is excellent and I wanted to see more of him, but his role is very much a cameo, I reckon if the movie had been more serious the audience could have really related and felt for that character. Delroy Lindo is incredible in this too, but again I wanted to see more of the two character's relationships that formed during the war to really feel and understand them. I had hoped the search for gold would be a sub plot to bring the veterans back to Vietnam but actually it's the focus of the movie with Vietnam as a sideshow/after thought.
The artwork, soundtrack, and message of the film makes me yearn for what could have been, a deep look in to the Vietnam war by a director that can tell these types of stories in a hard hitting way but it came across almost as a comedy with serious bits thrown in that I can't make sense of.
I don't agree with the "black lives matter" sloganeering at the end of the film either, I think if other races did that it would be unacceptable and it also places Africans in the predisposition of victim hood, of being in chains from the very start no matter what they do or who they are, of never shaking off their past and it enables other races to start their own similar groups. The movie also paints the picture, and many will believe this to be true as a result, of African-Americans being used as cannon fodder in Vietnam when in reality it was a class-based prejudice, a lot of poor white people died in that war at no choice of their own and just because they have the same skin complexion as the people running the war that doesn't make them the same people, they probably had more in common with the African-American they were dying beside.