Given his tendency to make inflammatory remarks like those he recently hurled at Clint Eastwood and the Coen brothers, occasionally one almost forgets what a prodigiously talented director Spike Lee is. Considering how diverse his filmography is, it was only a matter of time before he tackled a war movie. For this film, he chose to tell the story of an actual platoon of African-American soldiers serving in Italy in World War II. The war footage on display in the trailer is impressive without feeling like a ripoff of previous classics in the genre. Unfortunately, the trailer disappoints a bit due to its overreliance on the framing device involving a priceless artifact which one of the soldiers took home with him. I’m not sure it was really necessary to go too into detail about this plot point, when the film’s hook offered plenty of dramatic promise on its own. Still, I’m pretty excited to see this, and for Lee to prove once again that he’s still a filmmaker worth taking seriously.
