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By H. Alan Scott
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The realities of war do not care about fame. That is the stark reality at the center of Peter Berg’s latest film The Mosquito Bowl. The Friday Night Lights director shows the brutality of combat in the Netflix WWII epic starring Nicholas Galitzine, Ray Nicholson, Bill Skarsgård and Tom Francis as renowned college football players who are forced to put their rising careers on hold to fight in the Pacific after the attack on Pearl Harbor.
"These were sweet, beautiful, very young men who were just entering their lives, and it was going really well," Berg tells Newsweek. "Football was booming. They were famous. They were loved. And they were then destroyed."
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The film is adapted from the nonfiction book The Mosquito Bowl: A Game of Life and Death in WWII by Buzz Bissinger. It follows these young men in the Pacific grappling with the realities of war while being recognized for their football careers back home, a dichotomy felt throughout the film. Eventually, they organize a football game coined “The Mosquito Bowl” to boost morale just before the horrors of the Okinawa invasion. While rooted in a love for football, this certainly is not a football film. The sport, juxtaposed against their real-world experiences, highlights the tragedies of war and how combat can strip the most hopeful of their passions.
"I was looking for a certain level of immersion where I kind of want the audience to not feel like a spectator, but a participant, and to not necessarily know what was going to happen to make it very unpredictable, to not be necessarily oriented all the time," Berg says. "The level of intensity and trauma that these men had to go through, and that the Marines had to go through, and the Japanese military had to go through having these really horrific fights on these small rock islands in the middle of absolute nowhere."
The battle scenes are intentionally brutal and rank among the most graphic captured on film since Saving Private Ryan. The cast felt the weight of that immersive filmmaking. Galitzine notes the intricate coordination required to pull off the action alongside the camera crew to create the film's most intense battles.
“Actually, I think it's important to give a shoutout to our camera operators,” Galitzine says. "I have to say, I don't think I've ever been so close with operators, I mean like emotionally close, and I think that's partly because everything we did had to be in tandem with what they were doing.
"You know, the film will, I think, feel very unique to a lot of people who watch it, but it's important for people to know that this is a very, very unique way to make a movie," Galitzine continues. "It just almost never, never gets done."
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For the actors, the remote filming location in Australia forced them to rely on each other in a way that mirrored the real-life men they portrayed. The isolation provided a unique bubble for the cast to bond and process the heavy emotional toll of the production.
"You know, we had each other, that was the main thing," Francis says. "We were in Australia, and if you've ever been to Australia, but it's the other side of the world, you're essentially 24 hours away from everyone in Australia. No matter where you are. It’s such an isolating place in a beautiful way, and for something like this, I think that really helped. You know when you're awake, everyone else that you know is asleep. And so, it just allowed us to really be present with each other and have conversations about what's going on and talk through things that were going on in the movie and try and make sense of the day in saunas and cold plunges with each or the gym, like talking through the day."
That camaraderie was fueled by their shared deep dive into the historical research. The actors immersed themselves into the lives of the men they were playing. Nicholson found that reading the source material naturally informed the bonds they built on set and helped him understand greater depths of his character.
“That was part of the beauty of this experience,” Nicholson says. “You get the script, you read the script. The script becomes Bible. You read Buzz’s book. That leads you on another path, and you start doing more and more research. And then you get to meet these guys [his fellow actors] and how they know their characters and what you’ve researched about their characters. It kind of just snowballs. And the way that we all communicated and really worked together was special.”
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Skarsgård points out the overwhelming amount of material available to the cast to help build that historical foundation. The sheer volume of primary sources required the actors to ground themselves in the reality of the 1940s Pacific theater every single day they stepped onto the set.
“Well, I think with this particular movie, sometimes your research is kind of streamlined into a specific thing, you know, but in this one it was the book,” Skarsgård says. “It was the real people that we were all playing. It was the real conflicts that actually happened. It was 1940s. It’s college football. It’s all the different memoirs from people who served in the Pacific. So, like, you could literally research yourself to death here, you know?”
For Berg, The Mosquito Bowl stands as a personal project where his vision as a director was clear and uncompromising. Ultimately, that’s what you’re left with, that this film felt less like another project for a successful director and more like a personal one.
“I know that at this stage of my life, I wanna work with people that kind of ignite me creatively, and I wanna make movies that are about something that I feel truly connected to,” Berg says.
The Mosquito Bowl certainly checks all those boxes and more.
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