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There have been any number of movies about the hell of fighting in World War II, the most visceral of which have been made in the years since “Saving Private Ryan” provided a very enduring template for how modern filmmakers could render that carnage with both the spectacle of a blockbuster and the horror of a memory. Peter Berg’s brutal and concussive “The Mosquito Bowl” is definitely one of them! No one could ever say that it’s not.
What differentiates this unsparing epic from the scores of other stories about the Greatest Generation, however, is that some of its characters are good at football. Indeed, these All-American college boys are so good at football that, on Christmas Eve 1944, the soldiers are ordered to play a morale-boosting game of two-hand touch on the beach where their units are preparing for the Battle of Okinawa.
And for the span of the eight-minute montage during which “The Mosquito Bowl” actually makes good on its title, it’s easy to picture how the famous scrimmage — fought between a roster of impossibly beautiful athletes in their primes — might have been used to backstop a story that accentuated the senseless waste of sending thousands of young men to their deaths. Alas, for the rest of this 126-minute film, that waste is better expressed through Berg’s failure to make anything more of their lives, as the “Spenser Confidential” auteur’s latest Netflix project does almost nothing else to distinguish itself from a genre so well-worn that it’s seemingly run out of ways to blow up a human body.
Why “almost”? I was hoping you wouldn’t ask. For starters, there’s the decision to cast thin-skinned ESPN commentator Pat McAfee as an R. Lee Ermey-inspired drill sergeant. “The Mosquito Bowl” also stands out for how confusingly it conflates the thrill and teamwork of combat sport with the violence and camaraderie of armed conflict; war is presented as both a natural extension of what these boys have been trained to do on the gridiron (to the point that the soldiers briefly diagram their plan of attack as if it were a football play), and also the catastrophe that robbed them of a more innocent purpose. (Berg loves the troops as much as he hates the fact that generals and presidents so wantonly sacrifice their lives.) Someone declares that “The Marine Corps is the greatest offensive line in history,” and yet the film’s characters don’t seem to have any special advantages on the field of battle, as it would be glib to suggest that even the country’s best college running back might be able to slip free of a mortar blast. It’s one thing to argue that football is war, and another, much more asinine thing to argue that war is football.
Perhaps that’s why the Mosquito Bowl itself only took up a single page of the Buzz Bissinger book on which Berg’s film is based, and why that source material used the game as a lens through which a light could be shined on the semi-forgotten men who found their way into the lineup that day. It’s been suggested that Bissinger played up the sports angle in order to capitalize on the success of his “Friday Night Lights,” and given that Berg adapted that book into a film as well, it stands to reason that his “Mosquito Bowl” should do the same.
The problem is that, in stark contrast to Bissinger, Berg and co-writer Mark L. Smith only seem to care about their characters as a means to an end. The project’s anti-war ethos is solely conveyed by reducing collegiate legends into cannon fodder, as the movie is considerably less interested in what bonds these boys together than it is in the shells that blast them apart.
Perhaps that explains why I’ve been able to write almost 650 words without bothering to mention any of their names. To the extent that it matters to a film so blandly de-saturated that everyone in it looks half-dead from the start, Nicholas Galitzine stars as Brown University legend John McLaughry — the only character we know for certain will survive the assault on Japan. (The movie opens with a sustained flash-forward of John staring longingly at an empty football field as “Friday Night Lights” veterans Explosions in the Sky layer their post-rock shimmer over the soundtrack). He’s got sad eyes, a square jaw, and a brunette girlfriend, which is more than you can say for Bob Baumann (Bill Skarsgård), who has a devil-may-care attitude that disappears real quick once his unit makes land on Tawara. The only real source of contextual friction is owed to the rivalry between Purdue fullback Tony Butkovich (a glinty and magnetic Ray Nicholson) and the straight-laced mama’s boy he beat in a big game before the attack on Pearl Harbor (Tom Francis as the stoic and decent Dave Schreiner).
Individually, Butkovich is the only one of these characters who has the chutzpah to carry the movie on his back. Incidentally, he’s the only one of these men who was heading to the pros before the war got in the way. Still, it’s engaging to see them all blitz through life on their home turf, and “The Mosquito Bowl” benefits from Berg’s handheld and ruggedly naturalistic approach to how the players comport themselves off the field (read: they say “fuck” a lot and generally aspire to feel more like real people than they do patronizing impressions of what men were like in the ’40s).
But then the war comes to Hawaii, a match-cut turns a flock of birds into some fighter jets, and these beloved football stars all find themselves rendered nearly anonymous by the sea of shaved heads that are waiting for them at book. Little is made of their civilian celebrity, and even less of their individual decisions to enlist. “This is my rifle — there are many others like it, but this one is mine.”
Berg takes militaristic uniformity as all the excuse he needs to avoid deviating from expectation, and nearly everything that happens between basic training and the big game on the beach near Okinawa feels like it could have happened in several dozen other World War II movies, and almost certainly did. Defiant warriors curdle into terrified kids, bullets whizz through ocean waves, snipers pick off predictable characters at unsuspecting — or very suspecting — moments, and even the most hardened of marines find themselves staring blankly into the middle distance as their friends are decimated on all sides. Berg has always had a flair for the frenetic, and while there’s a perversely fetishistic veneer to the attention he devotes to entrails and enemy screams, it serves the film’s purposes that war has seldom seemed less survivable than it does here. (The film has no interest in humanizing the Japanese, but tries to compensate for that by presenting a few of the Americans as unrepentant monsters).
Still, for all of its supposed verisimilitude, “The Mosquito Bowl” seems less indebted to the reality of war than it does to Hollywood’s idea of it, and its abject refusal to flesh out its characters — a dereliction of duty, if ever there was one — makes it feel more contrived rather than less. I’m happy for Berg that he found a way to combine all of his favorite things into a single project (football, the military, and massive fireballs are all well-accounted for, even if Mark Wahlberg’s absence makes the whole movie feel like it’s forgotten something important), but “The Mosquito Bowl” accomplishes very little beyond violently illustrating that war is worse than football. It does that with such fervor that it loses all sight of what those things might really have in common.
Grade: C
Netflix will release “The Mosquito Bowl” in theaters on Friday, October 30. It will be available to stream on Netflix starting Wednesday, November 25.
English (US) ·