Crafting a blockbuster-sized action thriller that also doubles as a weighty awards season contender is no easy feat, but director Edward Zwick pulled it off masterfully in 2006’s Blood Diamond.

To be fair, the filmmaker had cultivated a reputation for balancing broad genre-based thrills with real-world sociopolitical issues and weighty thematic subtext in the likes of Glory, Courage Under Fire, The Siege, and The Last Samurai, so it wasn’t all that shocking to see his 1990s-set tale of an unscrupulous mercenary forging a tenuous alliance with a local fisherman to recover a precious gem from war-torn Sierra Leone (with an intrepid reporter in tow to add another unpredictable element into the mix) find so much favor.

A $177 million haul at the box office on a $100 million budget admittedly rendered the profit margins thinner than anybody would have liked, but five Academy Award nominations including Best Actor and Best Supporting Actor for Leonardo DiCaprio and Djimon Honsou helped soften the blow somewhat.

Action-packed, relentlessly thrilling, and explosive in more ways than one, Blood Diamond straddles the line between big budget entertainment and a thought-provoking look at a terrible period in history in spectacular style. Netflix subscribers are firmly in agreement, too, with the edge-of-your-seat epic having returned to the platform’s global ranking over the weekend per FlixPatrol, and it remains as visceral an experience now as it ever was.

Not quite universally-acclaimed and nowhere near a certifiable commercial sensation, Blood Diamond floats somewhere in between both camps, although it does a damn good job of trying to balance story and spectacle in equal measure.

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