THE STORY – Following the attack on Pearl Harbor, four of America’s top college football stars set their fame aside to enlist in the Marines. As they prepare for the brutal invasion of Okinawa, they’ll play in a legendary game featuring some of the greatest players in history — a game that, for many, will be the last they ever play.
THE CAST – Nicholas Galitzine, Bill Skarsgård, Ray Nicholson, Tom Francis, Brent Comer, Jack Ingram, Dominic Bogart & Pat McAfee
THE TEAM – Peter Berg (Director/Writer) & Mark L. Smith (Writer)
THE RUNNING TIME – 127 Minutes
Peter Berg’s latest film “The Mosquito Bowl” brings together two subjects that he’s been revered for in the past with otherfilms: football (“Friday Night Lights”) and war (“Lone Survivor“). Based on Buzz Bissinger’s book of the same name, Berg’s latest follows four celebrated college players who enlist after the attack on Pearl Harbor and find themselves swept from the world of cheering stadiums, intense competition, and adulation into the Pacific at a crucial point during WWII.Berg frames their story as a clash between youthful confidence and the brutal realities of combat that culminates in a real football game played by Marines in the shadow of the Okinawa campaign. It’s an interesting look back on a time when local town heroes and borderline celebrities would put themselves on the line for something they believed was bigger than them (practically unheard of today), but does it live up to Peter Berg’s best films?
John McLaughry (Nicholas Galitzine), Bob Bauman (Bill Skarsgård), Tony Butkovich (Ray Nicholson), and David Schreiner (Tom Francis) begin the story as standout college athletes with bright futures and reputations built on the gridiron. After the United States enters World War II, each leaves their football dreams and their families behind to serve in the Marines. Their path takes them through boot camp and into a war that bears little resemblance to the contests they once understood and were fairly confident they could conquer. As the men confront the Pacific campaign and its devastating losses, the bonds formed through football and military service become central to their survival and their grip on reality as the brutal effects of war rip through their once hardened psyches. The film also recounts the unusual but necessary game that gives the film its title. It was a moment of play and camaraderie amid a series of excruciating, bloody battles that changed the young men who took the field, giving them hope and strength to press on.
Peter Berg takes two things that he has done really well before, football and war, and brings them together in his latest film, but with mixed results. It’s a very bleak film, and I’m not just saying that because of the monochrome-looking cinematography. It shows the ugly side of war, with that old, often-used saying: “war is hell.” To that end, there is not much new here that you haven’t seen in a dozen other war action dramas, but in some ways it feels like a welcome return to form for Berg, whose previous best works all included some form of spectacle, with characters placed in dangerous situations they had to overcome. And “The Mosquito Bowl” definitely has its fair share of thrilling and pulverizing set pieces. The sound work, especially, is notable as bullets whisk across the screen, tearing through flesh with chaotic randomness. Explosions ring in the background, and screams of horror from the use of flamethrowers can be heard even after the credits stop rolling. Berg also uses slow motion quite frequently to allow his sound designers to play with thevolume levels, accentuating certain sounds while lowering others to create an almost suffocating feeling that effectively places you in the headspace of these four young men.
It’s all very harrowing stuff and impressive on a technical level, but the biggest issue with the film is that, aside from very surface-level introductions to its four main characters, it spends little time developing them. It feels like the movie justwants to move from one set piece to the next once everyone ships off to Japan. In some ways, “The Mosquito Bowl” football match feels more like the movie’s climax, simply because it feels different from everything else in the film and it allows more personality from the main four characters to shine through. It is uplifting and stands in nice contrast to the war and violence we’ve seen in other movies. But here we’re just seeing Peter Berg put his own stamp on it.
In many ways, it’s similar to “Lone Survivor” in that “The Mosquito Bowl” is following a small group of characters facing overwhelming odds they didn’t expect, as the Japanese soldiers prove to be a far different level of soldier than the American Marine. They will not surrender under any circumstances and would rather take their own life than admit defeat. Such horrific acts and displays of carnage shake these once unshakable young men to their core, rendering them almost as little boys again, who shudder in fear at the thought of having to face combat again. As the old saying goes, it’s all fun and games until, in this case, the bullets start flying. Each of the four characters approaches the war either with an innate sense of patriotic duty to defend and fight for their country, to return home to their families, or, in some cases, start new ones (all these young men were 24 at the time of this story), or with the belief that they can take their big-shot college football swagger from the field and onto the battlefield. Obviously, this is not the case. And even with their impressive physical gifts, which perhaps give them a certain level of endurance and strength over some of their fallen brothers, the randomness with which people can get killed in war does not care how strong, fast, or determined to survive you are.
Three of the four main characters deliver highly engaging performances you want to see more of, because the actors have fantastic screen presence that digs into the essence of what each man represented. However, the movie is most interested in the least interesting of them all: Nicholas Galitzine. It’s not his fault entirely; the movie just doesn’t give He-Man anything to do other than hope that he will make it back home to his girlfriend, which just doesn’t make for the mostcompelling of characters. Pat McAfee is a highly distracting presence as the unit’s drill instructor, who only shows up for a brief section of the movie to turn these young recruits into killing machines. But despite his flushed face, yelling, and incessant cursing, it feels like stunt casting meant to draw football fans, and perhaps professional wrestling fans, into what is ultimately an extremely macho and patriotic war film.
The film is most effective when the two pieces of its premise, the physical sport of football and the physical terror of battle, converge. Berg gives the action a forceful, immediate quality, emphasizing the scale and confusion of the violence that surrounds the men almost to a dizzying sense of confusion and overwhelming exhaustion. That approach suits the story’s focus on young people thrust into events they could neither control nor fully understand or prepare for. Yet the scale with which Berg stages the action scenes can also crowd out the individual lives that might’ve given those battles more emotional weight. A semblance of that emotion is found towards the end of the film, but that’s mostly thanks to the titular football game that takes place before the film’s true climax. It stands out specifically because it briefly restores a familiar set of rules that these young men are familiar with, where competitors don’t have to be enemies, and strength can be measured without deciding who lives or dies. Its warmth (deliberately shot to be much warmer than the rest of this very dark film) makes the surrounding destruction feel even more punishing as the youth are sent to fight wars started by older generations and throw away the promise their lives once held.
“The Mosquito Bowl” is a muscular war film from a strong director who just needs a good script to bring his tendency for action and spectacle to the screen with heart rather than just technical proficiency. Berg stages the combat with conviction, and the cast brings a believable presence and relatability to a true story of four young athletes forced to confront what their physical abilities cannot protect them from, no matter how hard they try. But the film’s relentless movement from one battle to the next leaves its central characters less fully drawn than their circumstances deserve. When it returns to the football field, the movie briefly finds a more affecting note that reminds us of the lives and shared pleasures that war interrupts. Told with respect for those who gave their lives for this country, it can’t help but feel derivative of greater works that have come before it despite engaging performances from Skarsgård, Nicholson, and Francis.
