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. 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. Bauman is the solid Wisconsin country lad, giving his younger brother instructions on holding the family homestead together. 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.
After some characteristically dehumanizing basic training, the men are hauled off to Tarawa. (In real life, the four weren’t in the same regiment, though it’s a forgivable dramatic tweak.) This occasions the movie’s first protracted battle sequence, in which these newly minted Marines get a swift education in what war is about. Legs are blown off. Pinwheeling men, having been set ablaze with flamethrowers, scream in agony. Blood burbles through gaping 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. Then there’s some football—the actual Mosquito Bowl—where they get to have some fun. This is the most exhilarating section of the film. It also feels like the shortest.
Galitzine and Nicholson, soldiers at Okinawa —Courtesy of NetflixIn 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. Most of those letters had a “Listen here, little lady” tone, but I didn’t mind them. The experience of watching a war movie is hardly the same as being in combat; it’s not supposed to be. Still, these guys had been to places I hadn’t. Even if they clearly didn’t understand my job, I’d have to admit to knowing next to nothing about 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. You can dramatize, or allude to, some truly horrific stuff—but choose your details wisely. One well-placed depiction of a combat atrocity can be enough to haunt a viewer forever. 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. 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.
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