‘The Mosquito Bowl’ review: Peter Berg’s football war drama on Netflix

The mosquito bowlPeter Berg’s new World War II drama for Netflix, immediately sets the tone with a famous quote from Herbert Hoover. “Older men declare war,” they say. “But it is the youth who must fight and die. And it is the youth who must inherit the tribulations, the sorrow and the triumphs that result from war.”

It is a statement eternal in its truth and devastating in its poignancy, one that should be kept in mind whenever the specter of battle arises. It’s also, you may have noticed, the theme of almost every 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 is often in his craft, his storytelling falls well short of that bar.

At least the premise had potential. Adapted from the book of the same title by Buzz Bissinger (including Friday Night Lights also gave birth to a film Berg), The mosquito bowl leads into a legendary football match played between two Marine divisions while stationed on Guadalcanal on Christmas Eve 1944. One might expect the sports angle to add a welcome new twist to the usual war drama plots – and it does, but not as much as you’d probably guess, given the short 126-minute runtime the match actually takes.

Its protagonists are a quartet of elite college football players who join the Marines after the bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941, and all are played by rising stars of the day: the omnipresent but seemingly impossible to categorize Nicholas Galitzine in the thoughtful role of Brown alumnus John McLaughry; Ray Nicholson as charming Purdue alum turned Tony Butkovich, a promising NFL rookie; Tom Francis and Bill Skarsgard play the anxious David Schreiner and the wild Bob Bauman, both graduates of the University of Wisconsin (although only David holds a grudge against Tony for beating them in a crucial match).

But if this epigraph from Hoover suggests a path well traveled, the rest of the film confirms that he has no intention of straying from it. The central themes are all the ones you can guess based on the logline alone. War forges indissoluble bonds of fraternity. War makes men from boys, but destroys their minds and bodies in the process. War is hell, unlike football, which represents the idealism of youth, except that football is also a bit like war if you think about it: “The Marine Corps is the greatest offensive line in the history of football,” declares a character.

The mosquito bowlThe big saving grace of – which might nevertheless be worth it for people who just like war films – is its technical elements. (Well, maybe except for the dull gray-brown-blue color palette that seems to aim for “serious and serious” and goes straight back to “produced by Netflix.”) The combat sequences, set in the Pacific theater and filmed in Australia, feel expansive and authentic, weaving around hundreds of soldiers running, screaming and shooting at the same time.

Berg, in collaboration with cinematographer Jacques Jouffret, favors close-ups that force us to experience the battles in the manner of our heroes, as bursts of disconcerting and terrifying chaos. Stuck in place by the machine guns that we hear thundering everywhere, we see with horror a friend being killed by a bullet in the middle of a conversation, or flame throwers moving wildly on the outskirts. But that’s often all we get. Other soldiers, both friend and foe, are seen through the trees or plumes of smoke. Updates circulate like rumors. What lies over the next ridge or at the next nightfall is anyone’s guess.

Given this commitment to their point of view, I suppose one could argue that these scenes that drag on for a while are also part of the idea: the guys who were previously hoping to get home in time for the Fourth of July — from 1942 – learn the hard way that fights are rarely so quick and easy. But as the minutes pass, it starts to seem like The mosquito bowl is primarily interested in showing how adept Berg and his team are at producing action set pieces, whether battles, training camps, or football, and is only secondarily interested in its plot or characters.

This impression is not lessened by a screenplay, by Berg and Mark L. Smith, which barely bothers to build connective tissue between said scenes. Even the titular Mosquito Bowl finally arrives with almost no build-up. No sooner had a Marine complained of low morale than a sergeant assigned two others to organize a football game; no sooner has this order been issued than we watch them queue up to play.

Logically, the necessary parts are all taken into account; it’s not like we have to watch Bob and David recruit teammates to assume that this must have happened at some point. But in his constant race towards good things, The mosquito bowl keeps short-circuiting the emotional beats needed to land them. Personalities are sketched only in the margins, mostly via brief snippets of chatter between shots. Character development happens off-screen, or perhaps doesn’t exist at all – it’s hard to tell if anyone is changing when everyone is so vaguely conceived to begin with.

The big ideas we are supposed to take to heart are reduced to disingenuous platitudes. While The mosquito bowl is not completely ignorant of the more harmful undercurrents of military culture and mentality, he is so invested in the idea of ​​wartime service as an act of noble self-sacrifice that he refuses to engage with them directly. So even if Bob announces at training camp that “This recruit is here to learn how to kill Japanese, sir!” the film keeps re-examining his eagerness or his motivations. He introduces such details only to completely gloss them over en route to a downright heroic ending.

This refusal to look directly at the shadows is all the more aggravating as we often see The mosquito bowl is happy to have clear eyes. In quieter moments, the film zooms out to a placid view of the globe from space, or zooms in on bittersweet details like a seagull walking along a corpse-strewn beach — reminders to maintain a sense of perspective about our place in this vast, indifferent universe. In moments of great emotion, he often freezes into black-and-white snapshots (sometimes taken from real archives) to emphasize that what we’re watching actually happened. But during the rest of his performance, he forgets that just because something is true doesn’t mean you can’t make it sound false.