Spike Lee blazes a path through Viet­nam in Da 5 Bloods trailer

The canon of Amer­i­can films about the Viet­nam War is wide as it is var­ied, with both sprawl­ing state-of-the-mad­ness land­marks (Apoc­a­lypse Now, Pla­toon) and niche projects focus­ing on a small­er cor­ner of the con­flict (Oper­a­tion Dum­bo Drop, for one).

It would appear that Spike Lee​‘s next film would fall into that lat­ter cat­e­go­ry, in its con­cen­tra­tion on one squadron’s post­war cam­paign, but with a vir­tu­oso like Spike, it’s entire­ly pos­si­ble that he’ll just make his way into the ranks of the great­est hits anyway.

The new­ly released trail­er for Da 5 Bloods jumps from the thick of the quag­mire to its after­math years lat­er, as a crew of black sol­diers return to Saigon on a two-pronged mis­sion. First, they want to find the remains of their KIA com­mand­ing offi­cer (Chad­wick Bose­man), and sec­ond, they’d like to retrieve a mas­sive cache of gold bricks that will make them all rich beyond their wildest dreams.

Of course, this being a Spike Lee joint, there’s much more going on than a sim­ple trea­sure hunt; the trail­er opens with a Viet­namese radio broad­cast implor­ing African-Amer­i­can sol­diers to rethink their alle­giance to a coun­try that couldn’t care less about them, intro­duc­ing a theme of ingrained nation­wide racism that will com­pli­cate their rela­tion­ship to the war they’ve signed on to fight.

The cur­rents of his­to­ry course through the trail­er as well, with cameo appear­ances from Ho Chi Minh and Richard Nixon sug­gest­ing an eagle-eyed view of the ​’70s and ​’80s.

The main quar­tet of grown men return­ing to their old shoot­ing grounds (Isa­iah Whit­lock Jr, Del­roy Lin­do, Norm Lewis, and Clarke Peters, four of the finest char­ac­ter actors of their gen­er­a­tion) must con­tend with not only their own aging, but the aging of Amer­i­ca. Time, as the sound­track keeps howl­ing in the trail­er cli­mac­tic moments, has got­ten away from them.

For Brooklyn’s favorite son, this appears to be the grand­est artis­tic chal­lenge we’ve seen in some time, blend­ing archival-style film­strip footage with sharp­er, crisper lens­ing in the script’s lat­er years. And the song blar­ing over the sound­track, The Cham­bers Broth­ers kick­ing ​‘Time Has Come Today’, announces the epochal ambi­tions of its 20^th cen­tu­ry sto­ry. Not to get anoint­ing pre­ma­ture­ly, but it sure has the aura of an instant classic.

Da 5 Bloods comes to Net­flix on 12 June.