‘The Mosquito Bowl’ Review | Peter Berg’s Gritty, Gruesome WWII Film Pulls No Punches

Football borrows a lot of familiar idioms from the theater of war. There is an offensive line, a defensive line, and both sides can find themselves in “the trenches” in their pursuit of victory (though the history of football does not carry with it a casualty list that surpasses 75 million). In 1944, as World War II was nearing its end, football and war intersected not just theoretically but literally, for a game that has been largely overlooked by historians. It would take nearly 80 years for the game to become the subject of Buzz Bissinger’s biography The Mosquito Bowl, and now the backdrop of Netflix’s similarly titled war epic, directed by Bissinger’s cousin, Peter Berg.

What is ‘The Mosquito Bowl’ About?

British rising star Nicholas Galitzine carries the emotional weight of the entire film as John McLaughry, the late Brown and New York Giants football player, who went on to coach the sport. The film opens somberly on a uniformed McLaughry as he stands on the sidelines of a football game with his wife, his haunted expression foretelling the toll that the next two hours will take on the viewer. From there, The Mosquito Bowl deftly introduces its core cast of athletes turned cannon fodder. Each character’s hopes and dreams are introduced, alongside glimpses into the home lives they leave behind. Bob Baumann (Bill Skarsgård), Tony Butkovich (Ray Nicholson), and Dave Schreiner (Tom Francis) may be from different walks of life, but they are united by one common passion — football.

Co-written by Berg and Mark L. Smith, the screenplay charts the men’s journey from collegiate football stardom through drafted Marine enlistment following Pearl Harbor, which eventually lands them on the sun-baked battlefields of the Pacific theater. It builds toward the real-life Christmas Eve exhibition on Guadalcanal, dubbed the “Mosquito Bowl,” where former college rivals and All-Americans played a tied game for their fellow Marines. From there, the narrative pivots sharply toward the meat grinder of combat, following each man’s harrowing descent into modern trench warfare and their tragic fates.

But despite all of its grandeur, The Mosquito Bowl remains an exceedingly by-the-books film that adds very little new to the canon of war epics. In service of standard dramatic conventions, the script massages history a bit, bringing these men together far earlier in their military training than occurred in real life, in order to engineer an immediate sense of brotherhood. Berg and Smith rely heavily on familiar combat tropes, and saddle the cast with broad, shorthand exposition — the bright-eyed rural boy, the stoic natural leader, the cocky all-star — that leaves the dialogue feeling more like a collection of archetypes rather than natural character studies. Despite the runtime, there isn’t a lot of depth given to the characters in the writing; it’s the actors and their performances that carry the burden of interest. Nicholson is a clear stand-out among the cast, bringing nuance and introspection to each decision his character makes. Francis continues his transition from theatrical work to the silver screen with a nice nod to his award-winning pipes, which is one of his most memorable moments. There’s a strong camaraderie between the soldiers, but it never quite reaches the likes of something like Masters of the Air.

When the film finally arrives at the titular game on Guadalcanal, it delivers a spirited, bittersweet sequence. Played on a field scraped out of the coral and dirt, with little crabs scuttling in the sand, mosquito netting for yard markers, and armed sentries watching the perimeter, the scene captures a brief, fleeting moment of normalcy for young men staring down their own mortality. Berg leans into the nostalgic mythos of 1940s athletics, highlighting the talent of these All-American boys. Yet beneath the cheers and hard-hitting plays lies a stark dramatic irony — the audience is acutely aware that most of the men trading banter between downs won’t survive their next engagement. It is the narrative pivot where the hopes that this is just another sports movie officially ends and the nightmare of Okinawa begins.

Peter Berg Brings an Astute Eye to the Theater of War

Peter Berg is a keen-eyed director who has never shied away from the grit or grime of the settings of his projects. Most recently, he brought to life his Mosquito Bowl co-writer Mark L. Smith’s brutal Western miniseries, American Primeval, and you can see the throughlines between the two projects. Berg’s filmmaking has evolved greatly since Deepwater Horizon, Patriots’ Day, and Spenser Confidential, almost as though he now sees the world in a harsher, more authentic way. Here, The Mosquito Bowl pushes the limits of the grotesque, with visceral displays of Seppuku, grisly burns, and cracked open skulls.

That relentless sensory assault is where Berg’s technical craft thrives. Reconnecting with the gridiron instincts that defined his cinematic adaptation Friday Night Lights, Berg stages both the titular football match and the harrowing combat sequences with a percussive, claustrophobic style that stays locked tightly on the blood and sweat of athleticism and slaughter. Yet, in trading so heavily on pure adrenaline and hyper-visceral shock value, Berg occasionally starves the film of the breathing room it needs to give meaning to such staggering carnage.

‘The Mosquito Bowl’ Struggles to Contextualize War

Image via Netflix

At times, The Mosquito Bowl veers uncomfortably close to being too historically accurate for modern audiences. The U.S. soldiers sling slurs towards their Japanese adversaries, who are largely framed as “savages,” while the Japanese POWs are brutally dehumanized. War is hell and art is supposed to make the viewer unsettled. Within this discomfort, The Mosquito Bowl does brush up against the notion that it has a responsibility to contextualize the conflict. There are glimpses among the core unit of soldiers as they recognize themselves as just boys desperate to make it home to their mothers and wives. But it ultimately feels one-sided — which makes sense for a film based on a biography that was born from Bissinger’s research about his own father’s military service.

The film does its due diligence as the credits roll, drawing attention to the fact that there were far more civilian than U.S. military casualties at Okinawa, but it feels like more of an afterthought. The Mosquito Bowl falls short of achieving what Netflix’s All Quiet on the Western Front managed to do, wherein German filmmakers actively acknowledge the role Germany played in World War I, and subsequently World War II, while still sympathizing with the young men on all sides who were merely pawns. There is an onus on U.S.-backed films to contextualize our provocations and the eventual atomic bomb we dropped, and The Mosquito Bowl never finds the time to develop these ideas.

Even with its narrative blind spots and a tendency to overvalue visceral shock, The Mosquito Bowl remains a brutally effective and thoroughly gripping watch. It may fall short of the deeper moral introspection found in the war films it aspires to sit alongside, but Berg’s style in staging ensures that the sheer weight of this tragedy hits hard. In the end, it’s Galitzine who keeps the entire enterprise grounded. Just as his haunted gaze on the sidelines frames our entry into this story, his quiet, weary and shell-shocked performance carries its exit, cutting through the relentless gore to remind us of the fragile young men underneath the helmets. The Mosquito Bowl is an undeniably punishing watch, but for all its harrowing horrors, it stands as an emotionally resonant tribute that is worth enduring.

The Mosquito Bowl is in theaters on October 30, and will stream exclusively on Netflix on November 25.