When you’re a kid, young men going off to war look like men.
asserted
men → ’re → men
When you’re a grown-up, you see that they’re really just boys.
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they → ’re → ?
If The Mosquito Bowl gets close to any essential truth, it’s that one.
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it → get → truth
This is director Peter Berg’s retelling of a true story involving young football stars who went off to fight in the Pacific during World War II, focusing on four real-life figures: Dave Schreiner and Bob Bauman (played by Tom Francis and Bill Skarsgård) were teammates and close friends playing for the University of Wisconsin; Tony Butkovich (Ray Nicholson, son of Jack) was a fullback for Purdue; and John McLaughry (Nicholas Galitzine) had graduated from Brown University and been drafted into the NFL by the time the war had started.
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war → involve → time
As Berg presents it, all four of these men went off believing they could win the war the same way you win a football game, with strategy and athleticism, only to learn how far off the mark they were.
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they → present → mark
The film’s title refers to a legendary football game between two Marine regiments at Guadalcanal, on Christmas Eve, 1944.
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title → refer → Eve
A few months later, three of the four would be dead in Okinawa: Of the 65 men who played in the Mosquito Bowl, 15 were killed on the island.
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15 → play → island
There’s a lot of drama inherent in that premise, and Berg—director of films like Hancock, The Kingdom, and Friday Night Lights, progenitor of the hit TV series—takes perhaps too much time drawing it out.
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Berg → ’ → it
He introduces the main characters with moderate efficiency: Schreiner is a solid, rather quiet guy who’s given to overthinking everything; as the film opens, his team has just lost to Purdue, and he’s still simmering with resentment toward Butkovich, who appears to be something of a hothead.
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who → introduce → hothead
Bauman is the solid Wisconsin country lad, giving his younger brother instructions on holding the family homestead together.
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Bauman → give → homestead
And McLaughry is intelligent and grounded, if somewhat undersketched, though he does anchor the movie’s opening scene, which gives us some sense of what these young men left behind when they went to war, things they could never get back.
uncertain
they → ground → things
After some characteristically dehumanizing basic training, the men are hauled off to Tarawa.
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men → haul → Tarawa
(In real life, the four weren’t in the same regiment, though it’s a forgivable dramatic tweak.)
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it → ’ → regiment
This occasions the movie’s first protracted battle sequence, in which these newly minted Marines get a swift education in what war is about.
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war → occasion → what
Legs are blown off.
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Legs → blow → ?
Pinwheeling men, having been set ablaze with flamethrowers, scream in agony.
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men → set → agony
Blood burbles through gaping wounds.
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Blood → burble → wounds
After we, and they, have made it through this ordeal, there’s a great deal of talking among the men about the grim circumstances they’ve found themselves in.
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they → make → themselves
Then there’s some football—the actual Mosquito Bowl—where they get to have some fun.
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they → ’ → fun
It also feels like the shortest.
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It → feel → shortest
Because the deadly battle at Okinawa is yet to come, and Berg will spare us no bloody detail.
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Berg → come → detail
(The script was adapted from the 2022 book of the same name by Buzz Bissinger, who also wrote the book that the 2004 film Friday Night Lights was based on.)
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film → adapt → that
More limbs are blasted off, more bullets end lives instantly or with agonizing slowness, more bayonets pierce tender flesh.
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bayonets → blast → flesh
War is hell, and Berg doesn’t want us to forget it.
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us → want → it
In my early film-reviewing days, even before the existence of comments sections, I would sometimes get emails from veterans telling me what I had gotten wrong in writing about this or that war film.
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I → get → this
Most of those letters had a “Listen here, little lady” tone, but I didn’t mind them.
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I → have → them
The experience of watching a war movie is hardly the same as being in combat; it’s not supposed to be.
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it → watch → combat
Still, these guys had been to places I hadn’t.
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I → have → places
Even if they clearly didn’t understand my job, I’d have to admit to knowing next to nothing about theirs.
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I → understand → theirs
But from watching lots of war films—from the time I was a kid, when my World War II veteran dad would bring me along to see movies like the 1976 Midway, because no one else would go with him—I do know that when it comes to depicting the brutality of war, less is more.
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less → watch → war
You can dramatize, or allude to, some truly horrific stuff—but choose your details wisely.
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You → dramatize → details
One well-placed depiction of a combat atrocity can be enough to haunt a viewer forever.
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depiction → place → viewer
With The Mosquito Bowl, Berg throws so much violence at us that it comes to feel like padding, while the depiction of the Mosquito Bowl itself, the core of the movie, is pure joy.
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depiction → throw → movie
War doesn’t make a boy a man so much as it knocks the boyhood out of him, fast—which may be why it’s both freeing and poignant to watch these young men escaping, if only briefly, into versions of themselves that no longer exist.
uncertain
that → make → themselves
The Aporia
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