Pressure review
By Joel Humphries · Watched 05.29.26
★★★ 3 / 5
Spoiler-free review
Pressure turns the weather forecast before D-Day into a duel between Andrew Scott’s James Stagg, championing emerging meteorological science, and Chris Messina’s Irving Krick, relying on historical patterns. It is a legitimate corner of history, professionally made and dramatically inert. Everyone knows the invasion happens on June 6, so the characters must supply the uncertainty; instead, the central meteorologist is abrasive, the emotional relationships feel manufactured and Brendan Fraser never disappears beneath his Eisenhower costume. World War II cinema has set an extraordinarily high bar. This clears basic competence, but not the question of why this particular story needed a theatrical movie.
Full review — contains spoilers
Pressure is one of those movies that's perfectly competent and completely unnecessary.
The film follows the lead-up to D-Day, focusing primarily on the meteorologists trying to determine whether the invasion can proceed. One side is represented by James Stagg, played by Andrew Scott, who wants to forecast the weather through emerging meteorological science. The other is Irving Krick, played by Chris Messina, who relies more heavily on historical analogues and pattern matching. That's the central conflict.
The problem is that we already know how this story ends.
Everybody in the theater knows D-Day happened on June 6. Everybody knows the invasion went forward. Everybody knows the broad outcome. So the movie has to generate drama through the characters, and I don't think it succeeds.
The meteorologist we're asked to care about spends most of the movie acting like an asshole. There's an attempt to humanize him through family drama, but it feels synthetic because we simply don't spend enough time with him. The same problem applies to most of the cast. Kerry Condon's Kay Summersby is clearly supposed to provide the emotional center of the story, but I never really understood why I was supposed to be invested in her beyond the fact that the movie kept insisting that I should be.
Brendan Fraser plays Eisenhower. Maybe it's accurate. I honestly don't know. But the entire time I felt like I was watching Brendan Fraser wearing an Eisenhower costume rather than Eisenhower himself.
The movie isn't bad. That's the frustrating thing. It's professionally made. The performances are fine. The production values are solid. I just found myself checking my phone repeatedly because I didn't care.
World War II movies have to clear a very high bar to be interesting given the proliferation of them. This one doesn't clear it. It isn't bad. It's perfectly fine. I'd just rather stream this on a lazy weekend afternoon than see it in theaters.