Peter Berg's 'The Mosquito Bowl' Skips Past Its Own Football Game

Peter Berg's 'The Mosquito Bowl' is built around a football game that the film cannot make land.

The movie, released by Netflix, draws on a 2022 novel by Buzz Bissinger about a match organized on Guadalcanal during World War II. The game was played on Christmas Eve 1944 between the 4th and 29th regiments of the 6th Marine Division. The players were drafted football talents who had set aside their careers to serve. The film builds toward the match but moves past it quickly. The battle scenes on either side of the game carry more force than the game itself.

The four leads are John McLaughry, played by Nicholas Galitzine, a Brown University graduate and future football coach; Tony Butkovich, played by Ray Nicholson, a Purdue graduate; Dave Schreiner, played by Tom Francis, a Wisconsin Badgers player; and Bob Baumann, played by Bill Skarsgård, also a Wisconsin graduate. McLaughry appears in framing scenes set years after the war, standing on a college football field. The story rewinds to 1941, when Pearl Harbor drew the four men into the service and paused their football careers. They train at Parris Island and ship out to the Pacific.

Berg co-wrote the script with Mark L. Smith. Bissinger is Berg's cousin, and Bissinger's 1990 book 'Friday Night Lights' became Berg's 2004 film and the television series that followed. The character work is thin. The four men share the same build and jawline, and the script gives them only small differences. By the closing credits, the review states, it is hard to tell them apart.

The production leans on speed and volume. Jacques Jouffret's photography drains the color from the frame. The camera takes first-person views of combat. Editing cuts fast. Explosions in the Sky supplies a guitar-driven score. The film stages Japanese soldiers in ritual seppuku and in execution by American captors. The leads speak often of killing the Japanese, and the film does not return to any regret they might carry. The movie opens with McLaughry on a football field, and the game on Guadalcanal takes place on Christmas Eve 1944.