It feels, at times, as if the viewer can’t escape. Body clenched, stomach tight — eyes perhaps slanted downward — as the oppressive violence folds around you. At face value, that seems absurd. The viewer isn’t one of the 5,000 Marines landing on Tarawa, facing a maelstrom of mortars, machine guns and rifle fire poured by elite troops of the Imperial Navy’s Special Naval Landing Force.
Viewers are perfectly safe, perched atop the woven synthetic fibers of a movie theater chair, but that’s how director Peter Berg intended the upcoming film The Mosquito Bowl to feel. The intimate violence thrusts the Marines from the 4th and 29th regiments, 6th Marine Division, as well as moviegoers, into “this barbaric madness,” said Berg.
The film, based on Buzz Bissinger’s 2022 book The Mosquito Bowl: A Game of Life and Death in World War II, follows four of America’s top college football stars who traded a pigskin for an M1 Garand and who subsequently faced off on the “gridiron” of Guadalcanal before being shipped off to Okinawa. Yet the actual football game, dubbed the Mosquito Bowl, occupies just a small portion of the movie. That too, according to Berg, was intentional.
“This is not a football movie. It’s a war movie that happens to have football players in the middle of the war,” he said in a release.
“These young men — who are just sort of blazing in the apex of their youth and their vitality and their joy — you meet them as college football stars. Then you introduce them to a hell, a flavor of which they had no idea even existed.”
“I think it would have been a tragedy if you said, ‘Oh God, it’s Hollywood. … Let’s sugarcoat it a little,” Bissinger told Military Times. “People have to know what war is. They have to know. We sanitize too much, and it’s just not the way it is. Maybe they’ll watch, and they’ll say, ‘No more wars.’ I know that’s naive, but at least you know what we’re sending our men and women into, and I think that’s really important.”
“So many people were killed in World War II. This is just a story of four of those people, and my feeling was to make it as intense and experiential as I could around those four guys,” Berg said in a release.
“Make the audience feel as though they’re actually in it and they can’t escape it and they’re not even sure what’s happening at times, which I think is very true to the experience that so many of these guys went through. … That was our strategy as we approached filming it and editing it and scoring it and sound-designing it,” he continued. “I’ve had many people who watch the film now say afterward that they literally felt like they went through something, and that was kind of what we were trying to achieve.”
Berg and Bissinger, who happen to be cousins, collaborated on Bissinger’s bestselling book Friday Night Lights over two decades ago and have once again teamed up to deliver this gut-punch of a film.
“Pete has this ability to read a 400-page book and crystallize and seize on what he thought the emotional heart was. I’ve always admired that,” Bissinger said. “He wrote the script. There were several scripts written, but Pete just hit it. When I read the script, his ability to incorporate everything into a two-hour movie was phenomenal.”
For both men, the filming of The Mosquito Bowl was personal, as both their fathers were Marines. Berg’s father served in Korea, and Bissinger’s was a Marine in the Pacific — including Okinawa.
“I knew nothing about what he did,” said Bissinger. “He wouldn’t talk about it. He would joke about it sometimes, but it was pretty clear he had put up a wall. As his son, that was his privacy. I didn’t want to violate that. But as I was doing preliminary research for the book. I finally said, ‘Well, might as well figure out what the hell he did.’
“And I’m looking up the records, and there he is. Not only was he a rifleman on the line, but he was also in one of the regiments, the Fourth Regiment that is depicted in the book. It wasn’t like I wanted to write this book as a pay-on to my father, but he was there for every scene, particularly on Okinawa.
“I just wish I had said, ‘Dad, I’m really proud of you.’ But he died 20 years ago, and maybe he’s … I don’t know where the hell he is, heaven or hell. But I hope he’s listening, and I hope he’s watching because I did want to honor not just him, but all the men who served back then.”
The film is set to hit theaters on Oct. 30 and premiere on Netflix on Nov. 25. It features Nicholas Galitzine (The Idea of You) as John McLaughry; Bill Skarsgård (It) as Bob Bauman; Ray Nicholson (Smile 2) as Tony Butkovich; and Tom Francis (Broadway’s Sunset Boulevard) as Dave Schreiner.
Berg, who penned the adaptation alongside Mark L. Smith, produced the film with Alex Gayner and Brian Grazer for Imagine Entertainment. Grazer and Imagine Entertainment previously collaborated with Berg on Friday Night Lights. Ezra Emanuel is the executive producer.
