The Mosquito Bowl

After Pearl Harbor, four of America's best college football players give up their gridiron futures to join the Marines, and on the way to Okinawa they suit up for one last game on a Pacific island.

Peter Berg's The Mosquito Bowl adapts Buzz Bissinger's nonfiction book about a real football game Marines played on Guadalcanal on Christmas Eve 1944. The story follows John McLaughry, the Brown quarterback coached by his own father, and Purdue record-setter Tony Butkovich. It also tracks Wisconsin teammates Bob Baumann, a hard-charging force of personality, and David Schreiner, the steady thinker of the group. Nicholas Galitzine, Ray Nicholson, Bill Skarsgård and Tom Francis play the four men. Each walks away from fame and a likely pro career to enlist. Boot camp quickly strips away their campus innocence and replaces it with the hard discipline of the Corps.

Training gives way to combat in the Pacific, where the four learn what the war actually costs. Between campaigns, their regiments stage a full-contact game stacked with college stars and future pros, a brief taste of the lives they left behind. The film treats that game as both a celebration and a farewell, since many of the players are headed for the invasion of Okinawa. Berg, who also directed Friday Night Lights and Lone Survivor, stages the fighting with blunt, visceral force. The friendships among the men carry the story as the casualties mount. It is a tribute to a generation that traded stadiums for battlefields, and to the bond the men built along the way.