When looking through Peter Berg's career, it's evident there are four things he absolutely loves: football, God, American heroism, and Mark Wahlberg. With The Mosquito Bowl, the creator of Friday Night Lights and director of Patriots Day and Lone Survivor combines three of those four elements into one package, presented through the flat, gray streaming-era visuals he's been chasing throughout this decade. Wahlberg sits on the bench this time around as Nicholas Galitzine, Bill Skarsgård, Ray Nicholson, and Tom Francis go through hell and back as part of the Pacific Theater in World War II.

We first see Galitzine as John McLaughry after the war in 1945. Without even seeing a before-and-after picture, we can already tell he's a shell of what he once was, stepping onto the field with pain in his eyes and all color drained from his face. Cutting back to 1941, he's leading Brown University to victory, where he would eventually become head coach years later. Across the nation, Purdue running back Tony Butkovich (Nicholson) earns his national touchdown record against Bob Baumann (Skarsgård, far too old to still be playing a college kid) and Dave Schreiner (Francis) of the Wisconsin Badgers. While they are merely college athletes, they seem to have more in common with Roman gladiators. Adrenaline courses through their veins as they withstand tackle after tackle, the weather matching that intensity with harsh rain and snow.

The men's glory on the field instills in them a desire to serve their country after the attack on Pearl Harbor plunges America into World War II. Running backs and linebackers are natural enemies on the field, so there's initial tension when all four men are assigned to the same squadron. Proving the apple hasn't fallen far from the tree, Ray, son of Jack Nicholson, sports a shark's grin and a playfully maniacal presence, never letting Schreiner forget that he set the touchdown record against him.

Leaning even deeper into the real-life football roots of the story, former NFL player and current sports analyst Pat McAfee plays their drill instructor, breaking them down and molding them into the ferocious warriors they need to become in order to survive. It's a piece of distracting stunt casting if you're an active ESPN watcher like me. If not, this perfunctory training sequence, featuring McAfee literally stabbing a football with a bayonet to make sure we don't forget the point of their football dreams being over, will have little effect. The group is quickly rushed onto a boat bound for the Pacific islands.

The film opens with the Herbert Hoover quote: "Older men declare war. But it is youth that must fight and die." It also takes an older man to make a war movie as outdated and creaky as this one. Each of the main characters is given a scene in which patriotic duty calls them to enlist. The adoring women in their lives need to be consoled, while the men promise they'll be home by next summer. Once in combat, Berg's visual language falls in line with every WWII movie of the past thirty years that has chased Steven Spielberg's mastery in Saving Private Ryan. Berg even gives himself his own version of Omaha Beach in the first major action sequence, with the men working together to climb a beachhead and take out a Japanese machine gunner. The action is just as ear-splittingly loud and bloody, but the chaos isn't controlled with enough precision to add anything to what we already know about the horrors of war.

Once an island is captured, the men's reward is to hop to the next one and do it all over again. They witness the fury of the Japanese army, with soldiers making suicide charges, committing seppuku after capture, and killing civilians caught in the crossfire. A postscript card attempts to offer a bird's-eye view of humanity by detailing the total lives lost on both sides of the Pacific Theater, yet Berg treats anyone who isn't American as little more than fodder for gunfire. It all becomes a rinse-and-repeat cycle of combat and football-coded philosophies on life and death. One of the men describes the Marine Corps as the greatest offensive line in history, which isn't exactly a hopeful comparison, considering those are the players who get injured most often. Luckily for our heroes, they're playing on the easiest difficulty. The enemy takes inspiration from stormtroopers and G.I. Joe villains, consistently missing their shots while waves of background extras get mowed down.

A unique identity finally comes into view midway through the film when the boys are ordered to stage a football game as Christmas Eve entertainment for the battalion. Featuring teams largely composed of All-American college stars with professional ambitions, it would become the final game many of them ever played before later dying in combat. The real-life game ended in a 0-0 tie (that's old-school football at its finest), but this retelling features multiple touchdowns and hard tackles on a makeshift coral-field gridiron. Rock band Explosions in the Sky, regular collaborators with Berg, provide a Moneyball-style score throughout these scenes, capturing the camaraderie and unrealized greatness that so many men sacrificed.

In the end, that's only about a ten-minute sequence within a two-hour movie, making the would-be defining moment feel more like an excuse for Berg and co-writer Mark L. Smith to make just another war film, something every Americana filmmaker seems compelled to do at least a few times throughout their career. There aren't any cinematic touchdowns to be found here, just ho-hum field goals. That might be enough for the Minnesota Vikings to start the season 6-0, but not when stacked against the weight of military and cinematic history.

Netflix will release The Mosquito Bowl in theaters nationwide on October 30th, followed by its streaming premiere on November 25th.