Alright! Today I'm reviewing Pressure, based on the 2014 play of the same name that chronicles a very tense three-day period in the life of James Stagg, a meteorologist consultant of the Allied Forces who has to convince General Eisenhower to delay D-Day from June 5th to June 6th despite the forecast from Irving B. Krick being allegedly perfect.
If that sounds silly or inane, it's actually not - D-Day was (and still is) the largest seaborne invasion ever, had been exhaustively prepared for months, had around 160,000 men attacking, and victory there would pave the way for the liberation of France from the Nazis. General Eisenhower was still reeling from the disastrous D-Day dress rehearsal Exercise Tiger, where a delay led to the accidental deaths of hundreds of soldiers. In short, the stress was enormous.
This stress is seen everywhere in the movie - Stragg has a quietly tense conversation with his wife before leaving for Southwick, his nerves are shot, and every time he enters a room it looks like he is about to break down. One of the first scenes in the movie is him slowly downing a bottle of water to calm his nerves once arriving at at the Southwick House. Andrew Scott does a superb job of portraying this palpable weight, and you almost wonder if he slept at all during filming. His character certainly didn't! I also liked the performances from Kerry Condon and Chris Messina, the latter of whom works ridiculously well as the American weatherboy.
Brendan Fraser as General Eisenhower was less certain. Aside from barely resembling the esteemed general, the scenes where he yells angrily were wholly unconvincing and without gravitas. The quiet talking scenes are good, and he really does try to sound like him during those, but those small character distinctions go out the window once intimidation is the goal. He doesn't sound angry, just like a loud Brendan Fraser. He has the "crazy stare" on lock, though!
I really loved the musical score, a dramatic sweeping sound that made scene transitions, shots of clouds, and, most importantly, scenes of people gathering data about the weather and plotting them on charts into captivating page-turners. Pressure had a very good chance of being quite boring without stimulating music to let us know what the weather talk means, and to that end composer Volker Bertelmann deserves all the laurels. There's also a very touching use of Spiegel im Spiegel towards the end of the movie, the second-best use of that composition after The Good Place finale.
On the other hand, every time they tried to do a parallel editing trick and have a diegetic song play, it felt overdone and overdramatic. Those scenes easily could have been cut or trimmed to get the movie to a leaner 90-minute runtime. While I'm beyond thankful that we're getting movies under two hours long in the big '26, Pressure feels a bit long at an hour and forty minutes and those aforementioned scenes are the only parts of the movie that would qualify as fat.
Now, all of this builds up to the invasion of Normandy, D-Day, Operation Neptune, which is where the movie really leaves an emotional impact. It intersplices footage of the actual ships and battle with some startling recreations of the first wave's slaughter to terrifying results. You don't expect how fast those first few young men will go down, and the stark difference from the rest of the movie really draws attention to the horror of war.
Additionally, actually showing the devastation from the decisions made in war rooms makes the entire conflict more real and weighty and justifies the torment the characters have been feeling for the entire movie. To actually show D-Day makes us reflect on how horrible war is and how violence is no laughing matter or something to glorify in an action movie or some vague threat out in the nebulous unknown... in short, Pressure-1, Oppenheimer-0.
Overall, I give Pressure a 7/10. "Pressure is the type of Father's Day movie Hollywood just stopped making after Valkyrie."
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