Oh man, you can feel the Pressure in Hollywood with this one. World War II movies are the “old reliable,” a perfect movie making machine where Americans come off as heroes against the evil of all evil, Nazis. Unfortunately, all the good battles have movies made about them at this point. We’ve got specific battalions like the Red Tails who have their own films. Hell even Finlands got an avenging unkillable soldier wreaking havoc on the Nazis in remote cold as hell wilderness. So what’s left. Like a personalityless middle manager on a conference call, someone probably said “How bout this crazy weather today, eh?” And so, Pressure was born, the last drip of storytelling yet untapped around World War II.
June 5, 1944. That’s when Dwight D. Eisenhower (Brendan Fraser) is going to deploy the largest seaborn invasion of Europe and surprise the Nazis to try to win the war. His weather guy Colonel Irving P. Krick (Chris Messina) has studied historical weather patterns around Omaha Beach and the English channel, and thinks Ike is good to go. But the UK brass and Eisenhower want to make double sure that’s right after the calamitous Exercise Tiger D-Day prep weeks before. So they bring in Captain James Stagg (Andrew Scott), the best meteorologist in the UK, 3 days before D-Day to make sure June 5 is going to be a day to be celebrated, remembered by the Western World.
Anthony Maras’s Pressure is similar to Captain Stagg’s. At the end of the day, 1) D-Day we know happened on June 6, and 2) this whole movie is about studying weather patterns and people behind closed doors making decisions; all the heroic stuff on the battlefields is ancillary to Pressure’s story. So why does this movie matter? Maras does heroic work himself showing us why we should care about his movie. The Exercise Tiger opening is a chilling reminder what happens when you make a wrong decision, using blood water on beaches to hammer the point home. Multiple commanders point out how surprise element is the key to victory, and longer than a couple day wait will leak the invasion plans and the Nazis will be ready and massacre everyone. The staggering amount of coordination necessary to pull this off secretly is something that the Allies really only had one good chance to try as well. Even the June 6 day delay is played excitingly, highlighting the even greater element of surprise launching an invasion during a giant storm. In the end Pressure was never going to be as exciting as Saving Private Ryan or Longest Day or any other battle focused WWII movie, but it does feel important and exciting, something I was unprepared for.
The cast understands the stakes too, and really gives it their all. Andrew Scott channels the best of the uptight British repressed culture, confident in his own ideas alienating others around him. But underneath you feel the torment and uncertainty bubbling, no better exemplified than when Stagg receives a call about his pregnant wife, one of Pressure’s highlights. Kerry Condon’s so good, by the end I kind of want the biopic about Kay Summersby’s life instead, navigating and succeeding as one of the few women in a sea of powerful men. Brendan Fraser makes you feel the weight of the world is on Dwight D. Eisenhower’s shoulders as he has to make this world and career altering decision, and how that pressure can get to even the most resolute individual. Damian Lewis and Chris Messina have a lot of fun as the opposition, with Messina happily playing the fool, and Damian Lewis playing a glorified caricature of a British man in power.
As a result, Pressure is the perfect “take grandpa to the movies” film. It’s lots of their BBC favorites in uniform, looking prim and proper, arguing about the weather, the perfect conversation when you have literally nothing else to talk about. I mean, there’s only so many times you can talk about the NBA playoffs or the Cubs chances of winning the division right?