The new trailer for director Peter Berg’s World War II epic The Mosquito Bowl begins with four young men who seem to have everything ahead of them. John McLaughry (Nicholas Galitzine), Bob Bauman (Bill Skarsgård), Tony Butkovich (Ray Nicholson), and Dave Schreiner (Tom Francis) are among the brightest stars in college football. But after the attack on Pearl Harbor, they trade their jerseys for Marine uniforms — and the cheering crowds in packed stadiums for the horrifying battlefields of the Pacific.
Based on Pulitzer Prize winner Buzz Bissinger’s bestselling book, The Mosquito Bowl: A Game of Life and Death in World War II, the film follows the players from the pageantry of college football through Marine training and into the brutal realities of combat.
“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,” says Berg, who also appears in the movie as General Simon Buckner. “These guys thought they were going to go play the game of war, maybe, and win the war like they win football games, and they were immediately introduced to a whole other level of human behavior.”
The clash of youthful hope and the chaos of war is on full display in the trailer, as the young men are plunged into a world of tanks, explosions, and ravaged battlefields. Berg and his creative team constructed immersive, practical environments designed to place the actors and the audience inside the battle.
“You just have to do less, be present, because it’s all happening for you,” Galitzine tells Netflix of filming the combat sequences. “Your human side creeps in while you’re looking at this hellscape, which is exactly what these young men were trying to hold onto despite the horrors of war.”
And while the title refers to a legendary matchup of all-stars who all happened to converge on Guadalcanal, Berg emphasizes that it’s only one piece of a much larger story. “This is not a football movie,” he says. “It’s a war movie that happens to have football players in the middle of the war.”
Watch the trailer above, and dive deeper into the true story here. The film opens in select theaters Oct. 30 and comes to Netflix Nov. 25.
