Forgive me, but it is difficult to not to be a little cynical about The Mosquito Bowl, Peter Berg’s grimly serious action feature situated (and marketed during many an NFL game) at the intersection of two predominant male interests: football and the second world war. Though both are certainly rich topics for cinema, and though I have been a fan of many a football/war story – most especially Berg’s NBC series Friday Night Lights – it is, let’s say, a tricky time for movies filled with dubiously nostalgic patriotism and masculinity. The trailer practically drips with a borderline parodic virility: a cadre of handsome up-and-coming male actors streaked with dirt; a group of men “trained for glory” and “called to war”, triumphantly hoisting aloft footballs, beer and guns to ponderous music.
But Berg is a capable and battle-tested director who knows his way around both a clock-ticking thriller (Deepwater Horizon, Lone Survivor) and the football field. So while The Mosquito Bowl, adapted for Netflix by Berg and Mark L Smith from a nonfiction book by Buzz Bissinger, fulfills its promise of American male pablum – there is many a clunky monologue about honor and duty and the “white buzz” of adrenaline – it also delivers on competently made, absorbing action sequences. (In huge news for Friday Night Lights fans, the football scenes here are once again scored by Explosions in the Sky.) Both in sport and in war, Berg has a knack for grace within visual cacophony and chaos; graphic sequences in battle and from the 1944 Christmas Eve pickup game at Guadalcanal that gives the film its name suggest, far more than its anvil-heavy dialogue, the connections between the gridiron and the battlefield, how the fleetness and camaraderie of sport can be wielded for survival and killing. There is a stomach-churning catharsis in experiencing, as in Sam Mendes’s 1917 or Alex Garland’s Warfare, the real-time brutality and capriciousness of war.
That is, if you can stomach the rest of it. Every sepia-toned off-field scene, with the boys being boys or with their token supportive girlfriends, is liable to prompt an eye roll, such as when the Wisconsin Badger Bob Baumann (Bill Skarsgård) quotes Jack London’s The Call of the Wild from memory. Or when a shirtless Anthony “Touchdown Tony” Butkovich (Ray Nicholson, who inherited his father’s wild eyes but less of the magnetism), proclaims that “New York City’s the biggest goddamn bull I known of, and I intend to ride the hell out of it” in a sweaty locker room. Or when John “Mac” McLaughry (Nicholas Galitzine) waxes poetic about how playing football “feels like magic” in a romantic bathtub scene with his girlfriend (Ella Newton) – who, of course, can only compare such flow-state nirvana to the feeling she gets when she has sex with him. Or when Dave Schreiner (Jeremy Allen White lookalike Tom Francis), the most grounded of this quartet, simmers when confronted by a college rival at marines registration.
These are scant character details for a real group of college football stars who traded professional glory for the US marines and the Pacific Theater after the attack on Pearl Harbor (relayed, as in several other historic sequences, by a scattershot montage of archival footage). But The Mosquito Bowl doesn’t have much more to say than that about its central quartet: they love football, their girlfriends and their country. They have bigger dreams but naively head to war anyway. The cliche of careless, precious youth about to be squandered – gestured by an impromptu football game in the snow – is rote, if still baseline moving, because obviously no 24-year-old brimming with life should die. (And you know that some of our strapping boys will.)
And for what? From basic training, to Tarawa, to camp at Guadalcanal, to the deadly assault at Okinawa, sergeants and soldiers offer their own blunt reasons to fight the Japanese, most laced with racism toward Asian people that ranges from casual to menacing (our heroes, at least, are violently put off by fellow marines hawking “Jap teeth”). One could argue – I have to assume, given that the film ends with a title card acknowledging not only the Japanese civilians slain at Okinawa but the 75m global deaths from the entire conflict, that the film-makers would argue – that such inclusion is merely period accuracy, a way to represent how US soldiers rationalize their role. But it’s hard to separate what is merely telling the story as these marines experienced it – the Japanese a faceless, mystifying “other” prone to murder-suicide – and what is American propaganda. The elegiac music for US victories, the planting of American flags and the prolonged, gut-twisting sequences of marine suffering and death, sit uneasily with the unnamed anguish of the many Japanese, solider and civilian.
As with every war movie, there are a thousand possibly better or more challenging war movies existing at the margins of this one. But this one, firmly for the marines, is what we got. Berg at times cuts to a wide shot of the Earth, the whizzing of bullets giving way to the silence of space, in a ham-fisted suggestion of war’s futility. It’s of little comfort, when the heat of battle is the reason to watch.
The Mosquito Bowl is in cinemas on 30 October and on Netflix on 25 November
