by Tim Gordon
Celebrated director Spike Lee revisits his earlier award-winning documentary, When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts, with sobering, yet hopeful effects in Katrina: Come Hell and High Water, a new three-part Netflix series marking the 20th anniversary of the storm.
Executive-produced by Lee, the series offers intimate accounts from survivors and examines not only the devastation of Hurricane Katrina, but also the resilience, inequities, and cultural endurance of New Orleans in the years since.
The first episode takes viewers back to August 2005, grounding the story in firsthand accounts of those who endured the storm itself. Through archival footage and harrowing testimony, Lee captures the horror of broken levees, entire neighborhoods submerged under 25 feet of water, and the slow-motion disaster that unfolded as the Lower Ninth Ward and other communities drowned. The stories of neighbors rescuing neighbors, contrasted against the federal government’s slow and inadequate response, immediately remind us how a catastrophe magnifies preexisting inequities. The Superdome sequences are especially wrenching; a shelter meant to protect becomes an overcrowded nightmare of hunger, despair, and unsanitary conditions.
Episode two pivots toward race, power, and the response failures. Lee doesn’t shy away from indicting the federal and local governments for reframing desperate survival into law-and-order panic. Instead of focusing on humanitarian aid, Black and Brown residents were treated as threats. The arrival of Lieutenant General Russel L. Honoré brought sorely needed relief, his steady leadership and insistence on dignity providing a glimmer of hope amidst chaos. It is in this section that Lee’s signature blending of rage and empathy hits hardest, exposing the systemic biases that left so many vulnerable.
The final episode, directed by Lee, functions as both epilogue and reflection. It covers immense ground the forced displacement of thousands of Black residents, the political maneuvering that reshaped the city’s cultural fabric, and the lasting scars still visible two decades later. At times, this episode feels sprawling, even tedious, but that is largely a result of Lee’s determination to ensure every voice is heard. It is his way of honoring the complexity of the tragedy, refusing to allow history to be told in shorthand or through a single perspective.
Lee, who showed such tenderness in 4 Little Girls, balances that same empathy here with accountability. He gets residents, past and present, to open up and share stories of heartbreak, resilience, and, ultimately, survival. His filmmaking reminds us that Katrina was not only a storm but also a mirror exposing America’s deepest inequalities.
When the Levees Broke was a masterpiece of grief and anger. Katrina: Come Hell and High Water is its necessary bookend, sobering, yes, but also hopeful, as it captures a community that refuses to be defined only by its trauma. And with this release, his second of the month, Highest 2 Lowest, Lee reminds us that he remains one of the greatest living storytellers of his generation, wielding both empathy and accountability in equal measure.
Grade: A
