When you’re a kid, young men going off to war look like men. When you’re a grown-up, you see that they’re really just boys. If The Mosquito Bowl gets close to any essential truth, it’s that one. This is director Peter Berg’s retelling of a true story involving young football stars who went off to fight in the Pacific during World War II, focusing on four real-life figures: Dave Schreiner and Bob Bauman (played by Tom Francis and Bill Skarsgård) were teammates and close friends playing for the University of Wisconsin; Tony Butkovich (Ray Nicholson, son of Jack) was a fullback for Purdue; and John McLaughry (Nicholas Galitzine) had graduated from Brown University and been drafted into the NFL by the time the war had started. As Berg presents it, all four of these men went off believing they could win the war the same way you win a football game, with strategy and athleticism, only to learn how far off the mark they were. The film’s title refers to a legendary football game between two Marine regiments at Guadalcanal, on Christmas Eve, 1944. A few months later, three of the four would be dead in Okinawa: Of the 65 men who played in the Mosquito Bowl, 15 were killed on the island.

There’s a lot of drama inherent in that premise, and Berg—director of films like Hancock, The Kingdom, and Friday Night Lights, progenitor of the hit TV series—takes perhaps too much time drawing it out. He introduces the main characters with moderate efficiency: Schreiner is a solid, rather quiet guy who’s given to overthinking everything; as the film opens, his team has just lost to Purdue, and he’s still simmering with resentment toward Butkovich, who appears to be something of a hothead. Bauman is the solid Wisconsin country lad, giving his younger brother instructions on holding the family homestead together. And McLaughry is intelligent and grounded, if somewhat undersketched, though he does anchor the movie’s opening scene, which gives us some sense of what these young men left behind when they went to war, things they could never get back.

Read more: The Heartbreaking True Story of War and Football in The Mosquito Bowl

After some characteristically dehumanizing basic training, the men are hauled off to Tarawa. (In real life, the four weren’t in the same regiment, though it’s a forgivable dramatic tweak.) This occasions the movie’s first protracted battle sequence, in which these newly minted Marines get a swift education in what war is about. Legs are blown off. Pinwheeling men, having been set ablaze with flamethrowers, scream in agony. Blood burbles through gaping wounds. After we, and they, have made it through this ordeal, there’s a great deal of talking among the men about the grim circumstances they’ve found themselves in. Then there’s some football—the actual Mosquito Bowl—where they get to have some fun. This is the most exhilarating section of the film. It also feels like the shortest.

Because the deadly battle at Okinawa is yet to come, and Berg will spare us no bloody detail. (The script was adapted from the 2022 book of the same name by Buzz Bissinger, who also wrote the book that the 2004 film Friday Night Lights was based on.) More limbs are blasted off, more bullets end lives instantly or with agonizing slowness, more bayonets pierce tender flesh. War is hell, and Berg doesn’t want us to forget it.

In my early film-reviewing days, even before the existence of comments sections, I would sometimes get emails from veterans telling me what I had gotten wrong in writing about this or that war film. Most of those letters had a “Listen here, little lady” tone, but I didn’t mind them. The experience of watching a war movie is hardly the same as being in combat; it’s not supposed to be. Still, these guys had been to places I hadn’t. Even if they clearly didn’t understand my job, I’d have to admit to knowing next to nothing about theirs.

But from watching lots of war films—from the time I was a kid, when my World War II veteran dad would bring me along to see movies like the 1976 Midway, because no one else would go with him—I do know that when it comes to depicting the brutality of war, less is more. You can dramatize, or allude to, some truly horrific stuff—but choose your details wisely. One well-placed depiction of a combat atrocity can be enough to haunt a viewer forever. With The Mosquito Bowl, Berg throws so much violence at us that it comes to feel like padding, while the depiction of the Mosquito Bowl itself, the core of the movie, is pure joy. War doesn’t make a boy a man so much as it knocks the boyhood out of him, fast—which may be why it’s both freeing and poignant to watch these young men escaping, if only briefly, into versions of themselves that no longer exist.

Mount Everest is the largest mountain in the world. It’s estimated that more than 7,500 people have stood on its peak, reaching an astonishing 29,031 feet above sea level in Nepal, typically climbing up the mountain’s south side. But Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin’s documentary Everest: The Other Side shifts focus to the mountain’s north face. It is here that two people, ski mountaineers Jim Morrison and Hilaree Nelson, attempted to do something that no human being had done before. 

Morrison and Nelson met in 2015 on an expedition to Makalu, the world’s fifth-highest mountain, in the Mahalangur Himalayas. The pair developed a friendship before beginning a romantic relationship in 2017, bonding over their shared sense of adventure. “There’s a connection I don’t feel anywhere else…I love how it makes me feel alive,” Nelson says about ski mountaineering in the new film, which hit theaters on Oct. 30 following its premiere at the Venice Film Festival. Together, Morrison and Nelson conceived a plan: They would climb to the top of Everest’s north face, and once they’d reached the summit, become the first to ski down it. It was the ultimate proposal for a pair of adventurous thrill-seekers, but one wrong move could result in disaster. They never got the chance to take the risk together, though: Disaster struck before they embarked on the journey, a tragedy the directors capture in devastating detail in the new film.

Vasarhelyi and Chin are drawn to stories of people who accomplish extraordinary things, and they set out to capture them in a manner that fully captures their feats, like in Free Solo, Meru, and The Rescue. Everest: The Other Side is playing in both regular format and IMAX cinemas, the latter of which takes particular advantage of the breathtaking shots the filmmakers were able to capture, offering a sense of how epic Everest is, and how dangerous. 

Though most people don’t participate in extreme sports, Vasarhelyi believes there’s something inherently relatable about these feats. “I think it’s fundamental to the human paradox, which is this ability to dream audaciously, and then the mentality, psychology, mania—whatever you want to call it—to actually have the grit, determination, and diligence to get it done. I think everyone can identify with that,” she tells TIME.

A tragedy changes everything

Vasarhelyi and Chin intended for Everest: The Other Side to capture Morrison and Nelson’s historic feat. But on Sept. 26, 2022, tragedy struck. Nelson and Morrison were climbing nearby Mount Manaslu in Nepal when an avalanche swept down the slope, killing Nelson. It was a devastating moment captured on camera, one that had both the filmmakers and Morrison questioning whether they should continue with their journey, and the film, at all.
“We always knew we were making a film about Jim and Hilaree and their attempt to ski and climb the direct north face, but these films for us always had to have something deeper. The part that stayed true throughout was this extraordinary love story,” says Chin. 

Morrison had experienced tragic loss before. In 2011, he lost his wife Katie and their two children in a plane crash. “I knew about Jim’s history and the loss that he’d been through, and how he had moved through that loss and found the strength and courage to fall in love again with Hilaree. That was extremely moving to me,” says Chin. “When we lost Hilaree, we saw that again in real time. We were living it with him.”

Together, they decided that Chin, a longtime friend of the couple and an experienced climber, would step in as Morrison’s climbing partner, replacing Nelson. 

“Jimmy and I fundamentally see this differently," says Vasarhelyi of whether they would continue making the film. “It was such a tragedy when Hilaree passed, and real life has to be lived in that moment. With the decision of Jimmy stepping in as Jim’s only climbing partner, my professional interest came into direct conflict with my personal responsibilities.” At the time of filming, Vasarhelyi and Chin were married with two children. The couple divorced in 2025. 

“The question was, ‘Do you want to make that film?’ It was going to be heavier. It had to be very candid, which all our films are, but this was requiring us to go one step further in this investigation. There was also the reality of, how do you wrangle the story that was conceived one way into something that could both honor her legacy as well as honor this incredible journey that Jim would go on?” says Vasarhelyi.

Ultimately, it was Morrison who made the decision to continue filming. “In the beginning, I didn’t want to keep going to the mountains. I was devastated by the loss of Hilaree,” he says. Initially, it looked like the quest to ski mountaineer the north face of Everest was over, and there was a seven-month break in filming. “Over time,” Morrison explains, “the inner fire and the passion for this project Hilaree and I shared together became a driving force in my life. I began to call [Chai and Jimmy] to say, ‘I’m going to go back into the mountains. I’m going to go on another expedition and push myself to complete this goal for us and for her legacy and her story.” 

With Chin as his climbing partner and Vasarhelyi and Chin continuing to document the adventure, Everest: The Other Side would go on. Instead of a story of a couple facing this incredible physical feat together, it became a story of processing grief and overcoming tragedy. 

The two expeditions

The expedition on Everest’s north face occurred in 2024. Chin explains why the north side of Everest, the more challenging route up the mountain and an extremely steep, 9,000-ft. face, holds such appeal. “In terms of pure technical difficulty, it’s really challenging. Because of those challenges and because it’s a direct line, it’s really appealing to climbers.” He continues: “When you’ve spent a lifetime in the mountains, you build experience to take on more and more difficult climbs, and as a ski mountaineer, more challenging ski descents. This is the ultimate line on the tallest mountain on Earth that literally splits the biggest face on Everest.”

The 2024 expedition involved dozens of people, including climbers, camp managers, cooks, and cinematographers. The set-up involved three different camps. The climb would start at 20,000 ft. and go up 9,000 ft. to the top of the mountain. An advanced basecamp would be established at 18,100 ft., as well as three additional camps, with one right below the entrance of the Hornbein Couloir, the most challenging and steepest part of the climb.

To accomplish such a challenging climb, the climbers would do rotations, going up the mountain and back down, in an effort to build up red blood cells and acclimatize themselves to the changes in altitude as well as to bring equipment up the mountain. The process involves pushing the body to its limits, over and over again, before returning to base camp and going again. “It’s hard to sleep at 18,000 ft., so it becomes this game of acclimatizing and getting all your equipment, the rope and all the oxygen cylinders and the sherpa up the mountain,” says Morrison. 

Unfortunately, one of the climbers on the expedition, Yukta Gurung, broke his leg on the journey up Everest. With that injury and the uneasy weather conditions, the decision was made to call the expedition off. “It felt like we were walking away, and we weren’t coming back,” recalls Morrisson. Chin didn’t see it that way. “Walking through the airport terminal with Jimmy, he was like, ‘Of course you’re going to go back.’”
Chin was right. In September 2025, Morrison, Chin, and a team of 12 climbers, including a healed Gurung, returned to Everest. The expedition took seven weeks, and this time there were no injuries or unforeseen weather circumstances. On Oct. 15, 2025, they arrived at the peak. Jim Morrison, Jimmy Chin, and their team of climbers—Carla Perez, Esteban Mena Yanez, Pasang Sona Sherpa, Pemba Sherpa, Roberto Morales, Erich Reopke, Nigma Tenjing Sherpa, Pemba Gelje Sherpa, Pur Bahadur “Yukta” Gurung, and Tenging Gyaljen Sherpa—reached the summit. It wasn’t over yet: Morrison still intended to be the first person to ski down Everest’s north face.

“We got to the summit about 2 p.m.,” recalls Morrison. “We spent about 45 minutes on top. I connected with Hilaree and spread some of her ashes. There were a lot of hugs and a lot of tears. Then I started transitioning to skiing, which might take five to 10 minutes normally, but takes a lot longer on top of a mountain. Just buckling your boots at 29,000 ft. Every couple of buckles, you have to stand up and take a break to get hold of your breath. Everything becomes laborious. Then I looked over at Jimmy and my other teammates on the summit and said ‘OK, here we go.’” Any mistake, Morrison reminded his teammates, and himself, could prove catastrophic.

The epic descent

Then came what Morrison describes as “the greatest run of my life—the hardest, longest, deepest, scariest, most dramatic ski run.” It took four hours and five minutes to ski down the north face of Everest. “It wasn’t four hours straight skiing,” says Morrison. “You take it one step at a time, one turn at a time, and there’s a lot of stopping.” He compares it to running to the end of the street as fast as you can, over and over. Going down at least means more access to oxygen. “As I went further down the mountain, I was able to recover a lot quicker, and as my physical endurance wore away, I got into a more oxygen-rich environment, which helped keep me going and able to achieve this.”

Morrison explains his feelings as he reached safety as “a tidal wave of emotions.” He recalls: “I just totally broke down. I’m crying and yelling at the sky. I’m all by myself in this glacier, and it was just a tremendous overwhelming feeling that we did it,” referring to himself and Hilaree. “I felt like we did it together, and we accomplished it. It starts with Hilaree and I, but it reverberates to the other 11 people that were on the summit with me, everyone that’s below me in base camp or in camp one,  and everyone across the planet pushing their energy for us to accomplish and achieve it.”

He looks back on the scale and scope of what they all accomplished together. “I felt like it was a tremendous team effort and something that humanity helped me do.”

In Netflix’s latest Korean drama series, Dead-End Job, the economy is literally trying to kill people. Lee Jae-wook (Alchemy of Souls) stars as Byeon Hyeok-jun, a jobless 30-year-old living in contemporary Seoul in this Squid Game-esque fantasy horror. Buried in debt from a landlord scam and subsequent stock-chasing, Hyeok-jun is actively considering dying by suicide. But when a mysterious company called Spider Staffing Agency starts offering him part-time gigs at 50, 100, or even 200 times the minimum wage, he is desperate enough to take them—even when it becomes clear that these jobs are supernaturally deadly. 

The series has an anthology-like feel, as Hyeok-jun takes on a new, terrifying part-time job more or less in each episode. Over the course of the eight-episode series, Hyeok-jun’s interest in Spider Staffing Agency’s jobs turns from financial to familial when he realizes that his father, who disappeared 20 years prior after falling into massive debt, was also used the temp agency. With the help of his younger sister, Ji-yoon (Typhoon Family’s Kim Min-ha), and Yeon-joo (Tastefully Yours’ Go Min-si), a mysterious woman investigating the agency, he commits to discovering Spider Staffing’s supernatural secrets.

What is Spider Staffing Agency?

By the end of Dead-End Job’s first season, many questions remain about the true purpose of Spider Staffing Agency. When Hyeok-jun first encounters the organization, it is managed by Mr. S. (Badland Hunters’ Lee Hee-joon), a charismatic middle man who sends part-timers to their probable death without so much as a heads up. 

When pressed by Hyeok-jun, Mr. S explains that these worksites exist where the border between the world of humans and the world of supernatural beings is at its thinnest. While humans live in the yang, explains Mr. S., these other beings stay in the yin. People like Hyeok-jun, who are desperate to make a living, emit especially strong yang energy when engaged in acts of paid labor. 

Spider Staffing sends workers to these border sites as sacrificial lambs to maintain the division between the two worlds. Surprisingly, Hyeok-jun has a knack for this work—while he may not always get the job done, he survives. But in the process, he watches many of his co-workers die.

Yeon-joo’s secret agenda

At first, Yeon-joo presents herself as an investigator trying to determine if Spider Staffing is facilitating unsafe labor practices. However, we find out in the series’ penultimate episode that Yeon-joo herself is a monster, tied to the other world. She wasn’t born a monster; she was once a young woman trying to make a living as a factory girl in a rapidly modernizing South Korea, roughly 40 years prior to the main events of the series. When Yeon-joo and her co-workers protested against their cruel labor conditions, they were met with violence. Yeon-joo was stuffed in a locker by her older co-worker to avoid the violence, not realizing that it was a doorway to the other world. When Yeon-joo comes out of the locker, it is modern-day Korea, and there is an amusement park where her factory once stood. It’s unclear at what point Yeon-joo turned from human to monster.

The real history related to Go Min-si’s character

Yeon-joo’s backstory ties into the real history of feminist labor organizing in South Korea. In 1970, activist Jeon Tae-il died by self-immolation to protest the treatment of women garment workers, who regularly dealt with sexual harassment, low wages, poor working conditions, and police brutality. The act sparked increased union activity, including the formation of the Garment Makers Union. In 1979, women of the YH Union organized a sit-in at the Seoul headquarters of the New Democratic Party in protest of the closure of the YH Company’s wig factory. Union member Kim Kyoung-sook was killed in the brutal police eviction, provoking widespread public opposition to President Park Chung-hee’s regime. 

Yeon-joo is not a specific historic character, but rather a symbol of this period in Korean history and of the role female factory workers and union organizers played in the rapid, painful transformation of the country’s economy and society in the second half of the 20th century.

Hyeok-jun finds his dad, and starts the apocalypse

Hyeok-jun promises his sister that he will not return to Spider Staffing, but he is lured back by Yeon-joo, who tells him she knows how to find his long-lost father. She shows Hyeok-joon the door inside of NeoCity Amusement Park that she came through from the other world, and tells Hyeok-jun that he can find his father through that door. He just has to make it through a shift at the deadly amusement park first.

When Ji-yoon realizes what her brother has done, she confronts Mr. S. about sending Hyeok-jun back on a job. Mr. S. insists that it is not his fault, but rather a direct result of the machinations of Yeon-joo, who is using Hyeok-jun as a pawn to open the door between worlds. When he does so, monsters from the other world will storm into our world, bringing about the apocalypse. From Yeon-joo’s perspective, it is what our world deserves after the way it has treated its most vulnerable workers. It will fully reveal the truth of the bones and blood our cities are built from. 

In the end, Hyeok-jun decides to open the door, even after Mr. S. warns him not to. While Hyeok-jun doesn’t understand the magnitude of his decision, he knows that he does not trust Mr. S., who gleefully sends desperate people to their deaths by labor. He watches Mr. S. shoot Yeon-joo several times, and sees no sense in his violence. The unleashed storm of dark energy pulls Yeon-joo and Mr. S. into its void, and tries to take Hyeok-jun too. While it has him in its clutches, he is able to see and talk to his father. A shell of the man he once was, clutching to a meager portion of money he hopes to give to his family, Hyeok-jun’s dad has been claimed by the other side. It is a warning of what Hyeok-jun could become if he allows an obsession with work and debt to take over his life.

Before the darkness can fully claim Hyeok-jun, Ji-yoon pulls her brother from the door’s threshold. Together, they close the door before more of the other world’s entities can escape into ours, stopping—or at least halting—the apocalypse.

Dead-End Job’s ending explained

Following the events of the season, Hyeok-jun is in a much better place than where he started, but his life is far from perfect. He has been able to pay off his debt using the money he earned from Spider Staffing, but he is back to the part-time worker grind. Still, he appreciates the small moments with his mother and sister, and seemingly values his life in a way he did not before. The world is unchanged in its cruelties. When Hyeok-jun meets a woman ready to die by suicide on the same bridge he started the season on, he stops her but cannot give her a good reason why she should live, past that he was like her once. Still, she decides to put her shoes back on and continue living.

In a twist ending, Hyeok-jun gets a text from Spider Staffing and returns to the abandoned office. Once there, he is offered a new job: as Mr. S’s replacement. In a voice message pre-recorded by Mr. S., the manager wonders if Hyeok-jun will make different decisions and come to different conclusions than he did in the role. In Mr. S.’s eyes, the deaths of some people were acceptable for the survival of everyone else.

Reports on the news of unexplained fires and otherworldly remains imply that there may be long-term consequences to Hyeok-jun opening that door. In the series’ final moments, Hyeok-jun opens his mouth to either accept the job or reject it, but the credits roll before we can hear his answer.

In a mid-credits scene, Ji-yoon receives a text about the successful results of a work recruitment from Kyung-il Group. The mysterious company owned both Yeon-joo’s factory, and the amusement park. Could they also be behind Spider Staffing? Either way, both brother and sister are getting pulled back into the ongoing supernatural battle.

Will Dead-End Job have a second season?

Dead-End Job leaves the door open for a second season. Its greenlighting is no doubt dependent on how the first season performs on Netflix. If a second season is greenlit, it will be awhile before it can be filmed, given that main actor Lee Jae-wook is currently performing mandatory military service. He is expected to be discharged in November 2027.