Peter Berg’s Netflix Football War Drama

The Mosquito Bowl, Peter Berg’s new World War II drama for Netflix, sets the tone right away with a famous Herbert Hoover quote. “Older men declare war,” it goes. “But it is youth that must fight and die. And it is youth who must inherit the tribulation, the sorrow, and the triumphs that are the aftermath of war.”

It is a statement eternal in its truth and devastating in its poignancy, one well worth keeping in mind any time the specter of battle is raised. It is also, you may have noticed, the theme of more or less every single war movie ever made. It would take some really sharp and distinctive execution to make it feel fresh again — and as admirable as The Mosquito Bowl often is in its craft, its storytelling falls well short of that bar.

The premise, at least, had potential. Adapted from the book of the same title by Buzz Bissinger (whose Friday Night Lights also spawned a Berg film), The Mosquito Bowl leads up to a legendary football game played between two Marine divisions while stationed at Guadalcanal on Christmas Eve in 1944. One would expect the sports angle to add a welcome new spin on the usual war-drama storylines — and it does, though not nearly as much as you’re probably guessing, given how little of the 126-minute run time the match actually takes up.

Its leads are a quartet of elite college football players who’ve joined the Marines after the 1941 bombing of Pearl Harbor, and all are played by hot rising stars du jour: the ubiquitous but apparently un–typecast–able Nicholas Galitzine as thoughtful Brown alum John McLaughry; Ray Nicholson as charming Purdue alum turned promising NFL draftee Tony Butkovich; Tom Francis and Bill Skarsgard as anxious David Schreiner and wild Bob Bauman, both graduates of University of Wisconsin (though only David maintains a grudge against Tony for beating them in a pivotal game).

But if that Hoover epigraph suggests a well-trod path, the rest of the film confirms it has no intention of straying from it. The central themes are all ones you could guess based on the logline alone. War forges unbreakable bonds of brotherhood. War makes men out of boys, but destroys their minds and bodies in the process. War is hell, as opposed to football, which represents youthful idealism, except that football is also a little bit like war if you think about it: “The Marine Corps is the greatest offensive line in the history of football,” one character declares.

The Mosquito Bowl’s great saving grace — the thing that might nevertheless make it worthwhile for people who simply enjoy war movies — are its technical elements. (Well, maybe aside from the dull gray-brown-blue color palette that seems to aim for “serious and gritty” and lands right back at “produced by Netflix.”) Combat sequences, set in the Pacific theater and filmed in Australia, look expansive and authentic, weaving around hundreds of soldiers running and shouting and shooting at once.

Berg, working with DP Jacques Jouffret, favors close shots that force us to experience battle much like our heroes do, as confusing, terrifying bursts of mayhem. Pinned in place by the machine guns we hear thundering all around, we watch in horror as a friend gets struck down by a bullet mid-conversation, or flamethrowers wave wildly in the periphery. But that’s often all we get. Other soldiers, friendlies and enemies alike, are glimpsed through trees or plumes of smoke. Updates get passed around like rumors. What lurks over the next ridge or the next nightfall is anyone’s guess.

Given that commitment to their perspective, I suppose you could argue that these scenes dragging on for quite a while is part of the idea, too: The guys who’d previously hoped to be home in time for the Fourth of July — of 1942 — are learning the hard way that fighting rarely goes so quick or easy. But as the minutes stretch on, it starts to seem that The Mosquito Bowl is primarily interested in showing off how skilled Berg and his team are at producing action set pieces, be they ones of battle or boot camp or football, and only secondarily interested in its plot or characters.

This impression is not diminished by a script, from Berg and Mark L. Smith, that barely bothers to build any connective tissue between said set pieces. Even the titular Mosquito Bowl finally arrives with almost no build-up at all. No sooner has one Marine complained about low morale than a sergeant has assigned two others to organize a football game; no sooner has that order gone out than we’re watching them line up to play it.

Logically, the necessary pieces are all accounted for; it’s not as if we need to watch Bob and David recruiting teammates to surmise that that must have happened at some point. But in its constant rush to get to the good stuff, The Mosquito Bowl keeps shortchanging the emotional beats required to make them land. Personalities are sketched only in the margins, mostly via brief snippets of chatter between rounds of gunfire. Character development happens offscreen, or possibly doesn’t exist at all — it’s hard to tell if anyone’s changing when everyone’s so vaguely conceived to begin with.

The big ideas we’re meant to take to heart are reduced to disingenuous platitudes. While The Mosquito Bowl does not completely ignore the nastier undercurrents of the military culture and mindset, it’s so invested in the idea of wartime service as an act of noble self-sacrifice that it refuses to engage with them directly. So even as Bob announces in boot camp that “This recruit is here to learn how to kill Japanese people, sir!” the film never stops to reexamine his eagerness or his motives. It introduces such details only to gloss by them completely on the way to a straightforwardly heroic ending.

This refusal to look directly at the shadows is all the more aggravating given how often The Mosquito Bowl pats itself on the back for being clear-eyed. In quieter moments, the film zooms out into a placid view of the globe from space, or zooms into bittersweet details like a seagull walking along a corpse-strewn beach — reminders to maintain a sense of perspective about our place in this vast and indifferent universe. In moments of grand emotion, it often freezes into black-and-white snapshots (sometimes pulled from actual archives) to emphasize that what we’re watching really happened. But in the rest of its run time, it forgets that just because something is true doesn’t mean you can’t make it ring false.