This pummelling Netflix production seeks pathos amid the gunfire as it tells the true story of four college football stars joining the Marines in the wake of Pearl Harbor, but not one of these noble warriors feels like a real person.
By Guy Lodge
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Film Critic
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Netflix No one familiar with the oeuvre of Peter Berg — the action merchant behind the Afghanistan war drama “Lone Survivor” and the improbably pumped-up boardgame adaptation “Battleship” — should approach “The Mosquito Bowl” expecting great restraint or good taste. Ostensibly, Berg’s Netflix-backed combat epic is fighting the same fight as Terrence Malick’s “The Thin Red Line,” likewise charting the physical and psychological torment of American soldiers in Guadalcanal during the Pacific Theater of the Second World War. But they are two very different history lessons. There’s not a hint of Malick’s poetic anti-war melancholy in Berg’s brawny, cacophonous Semper Fi salute to American military brotherhood, which certainly doesn’t stray from standard war-is-hell sentiment — rarely, in fact, has war been depicted as more loudly ruinous — but positively revels in onscreen carnage, as if to underline the mettle of its Marine heroes.
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