‘Mosquito Bowl’: Football Stars on the Front Lines

Peter Berg’s The Mosquito Bowl is essentially Friday Night Lights meets Hacksaw Ridge. It’s a movie with the same creative vibe as Friday Night Lights (gritty handheld camera, muted color palette, Explosions in the Sky post-rock soundtrack) but applied to a brutally violent true story of WWII’s Battle of Okinawa, one of the single bloodiest battles of the 20th century.

Also like Berg’s Friday Night Lights, The Mosquito Bowl (out now in theaters; coming to Netflix November 25) is based on a book by Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Buzz Bissinger.

The 2022 book—subtitled A Game of Life and Death in World War II—only has one chapter (of 41) devoted to the actual 1944 football game dubbed “The Mosquito Bowl.” Most of the book is about the war, and the young men who left wives, kids, and promising NFL careers to fight it. Likewise, Berg’s film adaptation is mostly a somber, unflinching WWII film, with a brief reprieve of joy in the form of a football game on Guadalcanal between the 4th and 29th regiments of the 6th Marine Division.

Just as in Friday Night Lights, where the drama of high school football parallels the struggles and triumphs of life off the field, the football game in The Mosquito Bowl parallels the “game of life and death” that surrounds the men at war. Sports are interesting in this way: They provide escape from real life but also training for it, an arena of danger and high stakes but not ultimate stakes. Sports often map onto life—we draw up plans and plays but have to improvise; we get hurt but can heal; we thrive individually through teamwork; sometimes we win and sometimes we lose.

Yet sports are unlike real life too. Winning or losing on the field is a matter of trophies and glory, but off the field, it can be a matter of life and death.

Young Men Willing to Fight and Die

The Mosquito Bowl (rated R for graphic war violence and language), opens with a well-known epigraph from Herbert Hoover:

Older men declare war. But it is youth that must fight and die. And it is youth who must inherit the tribulation, the sorrow, and the triumphs that are the aftermath of war.

This is a movie about youth—or rather, the passage from youth into adulthood that war accelerates.

This is a movie about youth—or rather, the passage from youth into adulthood that war accelerates.

The movie opens with muddy college football scenes in the fall of 1941, as the four central characters are introduced: John McLaughry (Nicholas Galitzine), Brown quarterback; Bob Baumann (Bill Skarsgård), University of Wisconsin tackle; Tony Butkovich (Ray Nicholson), Purdue fullback; and Dave Schreiner (Tom Francis), Wisconsin end. They were all-star athletes with promising futures. Many of them were collegiate All-Americans and drafted by NFL teams.

Yet December 7, 1941, happened, and their futures were all changed.

Once bound together by football skill, friendly rivalry, and fierce competition on the gridiron, these men soon bonded in a different setting: as marines in WWII’s savage Pacific theater. Instead of fighting for yards on the field, they fought for ground in a war of attrition on Okinawa. Instead of a football in hand, they carried guns and bayonets. Instead of tackling their opponents, they wrestled them to the death in hand-to-hand combat.

Like many in the Greatest Generation, these men volunteered to enlist and fight. The Mosquito Bowl celebrates their duty and sacrifice. In one scene, Baumann’s younger brother says, “You don’t have to go,” to which Baumann replies, “I do. I’m needed.”

It’s hard to imagine star athletes, whether collegiate or professional, volunteering to go to war in 2026. But in 1943, it was normal. Okinawa, Bissinger writes in the book, was “by far the largest collection of athletes ever to die in a single battle.” And in the entirety of WWII, 21 NFL players died in combat, as well as two players from Major League Baseball.

Why were they so willing to lay down their lives? Perhaps back then, men had the bigger horizon more in view. Life isn’t about serving oneself. It’s about serving others, fighting for things bigger than personal fulfillment. As Dave Schreiner tells John McLaughry, “This is us sacrificing for the unborn. What other real thing is there? What’s the point in all of this if it’s not for passing something on?”

Numbed by War-Movie Violence

The Mosquito Bowl honors the Greatest Generation and is commendable in its straightforward embrace of manly virtues like duty and sacrifice. But I disliked several aspects of the film.

One is the language. I realize wartime soldiers in every era tend to be prolific in their employment of profane language. But even if men in the 1940s were as creative with the f-word as they are in this movie, is it really essential to the movie? It makes the film much less likely to be watched by families, which is a shame because it’s the sort of thing dads might want to watch with their younger sons.

I also wish Berg had given less screen time to bloody battles and more time to quieter character moments and the titular football game. I get that it’s important to underscore the savage bloodbath that was the Pacific theater, and I get that the joyful escape of football is most pronounced when juxtaposed with the horrific realities of war. But it’s hard for contemporary war movies to viscerally depict the “war is hell” experience after the genre has been so saturated.

Edward Berger’s adaptation of All Quiet on the Western Front (2022) felt like the final word on war-movie blood and guts. We’ve become numb to watching bodies get mangled every which way. Going forward, movies about savage warfare probably need to take a different approach. There are ways to capture battle horror without showing every gruesome detail. Furthermore, the desaturated, shaky-camera, chaotic choreography of war movies has become clichéd. I checked out a bit during these prolonged battle scenes.

At times, it felt like Berg was inspired by Terrence Malick’s Guadalcanal movie, The Thin Red Line (one of the best war movies of all time). But what made Malick’s film so effective is that it employed violence only in a few intense, lyrical sequences, juxtaposed with long stretches of more contemplative material and tender character moments.

The experience of war is important to capture accurately. But a war film becomes great when the meaning of war is also a focal point. Clint Eastwood’s WWII diptych, Flags of our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima (2006), strikes this balance well. The action-to-reflection ratio is not quite right in The Mosquito Bowl.

Football as Far as the Curse Is Found

The high point of Berg’s movie is the Mosquito Bowl game, even though it occupies too little of the overall runtime. In a movie that is rather bleak thematically and visually, the game provides a much-needed moment of joy for the characters and audience.

Hosted as a morale booster for soldiers who would soon be sent to fight on Okinawa, the game (broadcast on the “mosquito radio network”) was set up to be “two-hand touch” only but quickly devolved into full-on tackle. Some of the guys wore Santa hats. There were big smiles, laughs, playful rivalry: young men allowed to be boys again.

Here’s how Bissinger describes it in the prologue of his book:

For roughly two hours the Mosquito Bowl wasn’t simply a reminder of what life had once been like for the players, but freedom and abandon, with the spectators captured in the same moment, screaming their heads off, whether drunk or sober. The beauty of sports, the ultimate power of it to carry you away, had never been stronger.

But the scene is also bittersweet, for we know it’s not reality. Real life is harsh. Okinawa looms. Many of these boys playing football on Christmas Eve 1944 won’t live to see Christmas Eve 1945.

This scene reminded me of the resonant poetry of Friday Night Lights, which depicted football in much the same way: youthful vibrancy and freewheeling joy, but tempered by the painful pressures of expectations, responsibilities off the field, aging past one’s physical prime, and ultimately mortality itself.

Youth is a fleeting thing. Peak athletic performance is even more fleeting. Texas is not forever. The average career length for NFL players these days ranges from three to seven years. We’re at our “prime,” whether in sports or as soldiers, for ever so short a time. Life is fragile and ephemeral. Of the 65 players in the Mosquito Bowl game, 15 would be dead on Okinawa within months.

Of the 65 players in the Mosquito Bowl game, 15 would be dead on Okinawa within months.

Yet the Mosquito Bowl game scene, complete with a stirring Explosions in the Sky soundtrack, feels almost eschatological, similar to some scenes in The Thin Red Line of R&R time away from the front lines.

These are scenes of Edenic innocence and joy amid the horrors of a planet covered by the curse. Whether football games or a Bob Hope USO performance for troops (a brief scene in the film), recreation hints at heaven: to re-create, to revive what’s dead, to restore what’s broken.

By God’s grace, reminders of this persist everywhere, even in an island football game between marines: hope beyond the horizon of this war-torn world.