There have been many films about the hell of World War II combat, the most visceral of which were made in the years after “Saving Private Ryan” provided a very enduring model 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 hard-hitting “The Mosquito Bowl” is definitely one of them! No one can ever say otherwise.
What sets this unforgiving epic apart from dozens of other Greatest Generation stories, however, is that some of its characters are good at football. Indeed, these American college students are SO good at football that, on Christmas Eve 1944, soldiers were ordered to play a game of two-handed touch to boost morale on the beach where their units were preparing for the Battle of Okinawa.
And during the eight-minute montage in which “The Mosquito Bowl” lives up to its title, it’s easy to imagine how the famous melee — fought between a roster of impossibly handsome athletes in the prime of their lives — could have been used to support 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, this waste is best expressed through Berg’s inability to do anything more with his life, as the “Spenser Confidential” author’s latest Netflix project almost does. nothing else to distinguish itself from a genre so hackneyed that it seems to lack the means to explode 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” is also notable for the way it confusingly conflates the thrill and teamwork of combat sport with the violence and camaraderie of armed conflict; the war is presented both as a natural extension of what these boys were trained to do in the field (to the point where the soldiers briefly diagram their plan of attack as if it were a football match), and also as the catastrophe that deprived them of a more innocent objective. (Berg loves the troops as much as he hates the fact that generals and presidents sacrifice their lives for no reason.) 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 particular advantages on the battlefield, because it would be flippant to suggest that even the best college running back in the country might be able to escape a mortar blast. It’s one thing to pretend that football is war, and another, much stupider thing, to pretend that war is football.
Perhaps that’s why the Mosquito Bowl itself took up only a single page of Buzz Bissinger’s 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 shone on the half-forgotten men who found their way into the lineup that day. It has been suggested that Bissinger played up the sporting aspect 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, unlike Bissinger, Berg and his co-writer Mark L. Smith only seem to care about their characters as a means to an end. The project’s anti-war philosophy is conveyed solely by reducing collegiate legends to cannon fodder, as the film is considerably less interested in what binds these boys together than in the shells that destroy them.
Perhaps this explains why I was able to write almost 650 words without bothering to mention any of their names. To the extent that it matters for a film so blandly desaturated that everyone seems half-dead from the start, Nicholas Galitzine plays Brown University legend John McLaughry – the only character we know for sure will survive the assault on Japan. (The film opens with a sustained flash-forward of John gazing longingly at an empty football field as “Friday Night Lights” veterans Explosions in the Sky overlay their post-rock highlights over the soundtrack). He’s got sad eyes, a square jaw, and a dark-haired girlfriend, which is more than can be said for Bob Baumann (Bill Skarsgård), who has a carefree attitude that quickly disappears once his unit lands on Tawara. The only real source of contextual friction is due to the rivalry between Purdue guard Tony Butkovich (a brilliant 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 nerve to carry the film on his back. He is also the only one of these men to move towards the pros before the war prevents him from doing so. Still, it’s captivating to watch them all embrace life on their own field, and “The Mosquito Bowl” benefits from Berg’s simple, naturalistic approach to how the players behave off the field (read: they say “fuck” a lot and generally aspire to feel more like real people than condescending to what men were like in the ’40s).
But then war comes to Hawaii, a game turns a flock of birds into fighter planes, and these beloved football stars all find themselves rendered almost anonymous by the sea of shaved heads waiting for them at the book. Little is said of their civilian celebrity, and even less of their individual decision to enlist. “This is my rifle, there are many others like it, but this one is mine.”
Berg views militaristic uniformity as the excuse he needs to avoid deviating from expectations, and almost everything that happens between basic training and the big match on the beach near Okinawa feels like it could have happened in several dozen other World War II films, and that is almost certainly the case. Defiant warriors huddle against terrified children, bullets whiz through ocean waves, snipers take out unsuspecting predictable characters – or very suspecting – moments, and even the most hardened marines find themselves staring into the distance as their friends are decimated on all sides. Berg has always had a flair for frenzy, and while there’s a perversely fetishistic veneer to the attention he devotes to the entrails and screams of the enemy, it serves the film’s purposes that war has rarely seemed less viable than here. (The film has no interest in humanizing the Japanese, but attempts to compensate for this by presenting a few Americans as unrepentant monsters).
Yet for all its supposed verisimilitude, “The Mosquito Bowl” seems less beholden to the reality of war than 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 seem more artificial rather than less. I’m happy for Berg for finding a way to combine all of his favorite things into one project (football, the military, and huge fireballs are all well explained, although Mark Wahlberg’s absence makes it seem like the whole movie forgot something important), but “The Mosquito Bowl” doesn’t accomplish much beyond violently illustrating that war is worse than football. He does it with such fervor that he loses sight of what these things might actually have in common.
Grade: C
Netflix to release “The Mosquito Bowl” in theaters Friday, October 30. It will be available to stream on Netflix starting Wednesday, November 25.
Gn entert
