War Is Hell—And The Mosquito Bowl Won’t Let Us Forget It

When you’re a kid, young men going off to war look like men. When you’re a grown-up, you see that they’re really just boys. If The Mosquito Bowl gets close to any essential truth, it’s that one. This is director Peter Berg’s retelling of a true story involving young football stars who went off to fight in the Pacific during World War II, focusing on four real-life figures: Dave Schreiner and Bob Bauman (played by Tom Francis and Bill Skarsgård) were teammates and close friends playing for the University of Wisconsin; Tony Butkovich (Ray Nicholson, son of Jack) was a fullback for Purdue; and John McLaughry (Nicholas Galitzine) had graduated from Brown University and been drafted into the NFL by the time the war had started. As Berg presents it, all four of these men went off believing they could win the war the same way you win a football game, with strategy and athleticism, only to learn how far off the mark they were. The film’s title refers to a legendary football game between two Marine regiments at Guadalcanal, on Christmas Eve, 1944. A few months later, three of the four would be dead in Okinawa: Of the 65 men who played in the Mosquito Bowl, 15 were killed on the island.There’s a lot of drama inherent in that premise, and Berg—director of films like Hancock, The Kingdom, and Friday Night Lights, progenitor of the hit TV series—takes perhaps too much time drawing it out. He introduces the main characters with moderate efficiency: Schreiner is a solid, rather quiet guy who’s given to overthinking everything; as the film opens, his team has just lost to Purdue, and he’s still simmering with resentment toward Butkovich, who appears to be something of a hothead. Bauman is the solid Wisconsin country lad, giving his younger brother instructions on holding the family homestead together. And McLaughry is intelligent and grounded, if somewhat undersketched, though he does anchor the movie’s opening scene, which gives us some sense of what these young men left behind when they went to war, things they could never get back.After some characteristically dehumanizing basic training, the men are hauled off to Tarawa. (In real life, the four weren’t in the same regiment, though it’s a forgivable dramatic tweak.) This occasions the movie’s first protracted battle sequence, in which these newly minted Marines get a swift education in what war is about. Legs are blown off. Pinwheeling men, having been set ablaze with flamethrowers, scream in agony. Blood burbles through gaping wounds. After we, and they, have made it through this ordeal, there’s a great deal of talking among the men about the grim circumstances they’ve found themselves in. Then there’s some football—the actual Mosquito Bowl—where they get to have some fun. This is the most exhilarating section of the film. It also feels like the shortest.Galitzine and Nicholson, soldiers at Okinawa Courtesy of NetflixBecause the deadly battle at Okinawa is yet to come, and Berg will spare us no bloody detail. (The script was adapted from the 2022 book of the same name by Buzz Bissinger, who also wrote the book that the 2004 film Friday Night Lights was based on.) More limbs are blasted off, more bullets end lives instantly or with agonizing slowness, more bayonets pierce tender flesh. War is hell, and Berg doesn’t want us to forget it.In my early film-reviewing days, even before the existence of comments sections, I would sometimes get emails from veterans telling me what I had gotten wrong in writing about this or that war film. Most of those letters had a “Listen here, little lady” tone, but I didn’t mind them. The experience of watching a war movie is hardly the same as being in combat; it’s not supposed to be. Still, these guys had been to places I hadn’t. Even if they clearly didn’t understand my job, I’d have to admit to knowing next to nothing about theirs.But from watching lots of war films—from the time I was a kid, when my World War II veteran dad would bring me along to see movies like the 1976 Midway, because no one else would go with him—I do know that when it comes to depicting the brutality of war, less is more. You can dramatize, or allude to, some truly horrific stuff—but choose your details wisely. One well-placed depiction of a combat atrocity can be enough to haunt a viewer forever. With The Mosquito Bowl, Berg throws so much violence at us that it comes to feel like padding, while the depiction of the Mosquito Bowl itself, the core of the movie, is pure joy. War doesn’t make a boy a man so much as it knocks the boyhood out of him, fast—which may be why it’s both freeing and poignant to watch these young men escaping, if only briefly, into versions of themselves that no longer exist.