{"id":19478,"date":"2026-05-27T12:32:04","date_gmt":"2026-05-27T12:32:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/2026\/05\/27\/movie-review-d-day-drama-pressure-makes-the-weather-worth-watching-the-spokesman-review\/"},"modified":"2026-05-27T12:32:04","modified_gmt":"2026-05-27T12:32:04","slug":"movie-review-d-day-drama-pressure-makes-the-weather-worth-watching-the-spokesman-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/2026\/05\/27\/movie-review-d-day-drama-pressure-makes-the-weather-worth-watching-the-spokesman-review\/","title":{"rendered":"Movie review: D-Day drama \u2018Pressure\u2019 makes the weather worth watching – The Spokesman-Review"},"content":{"rendered":"

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‘Pressure’
3.5 stars (out of 4)
Credits: Directed by Anthony Maras, starring Brendan Fraser, Andrew Schott, Kerry Condon, Damian Lewis, Henry Ashton and Chris Messina.
Rating\/runtime: PG-13 for war violence, bloody images, some strong language, and smoking; 100 minutes.
How to watch: In theaters Friday.
The premise of \u201cPressure,\u201d the new World War II movie from director Anthony Maras and writer David Haig, is a hyperfocused look at the days leading up to D-Day with a special focus on the meteorologists. It\u2019s a one-setting thriller set in the pressure cooker of General Dwight D. Eisenhower\u2019s war room at an English country estate that works backwards from the 1961 Eisenhower quip to JFK that attributed his success in Normandy to the Allies having \u201cbetter meteorologists than the Germans.\u201d
If you\u2019re skeptical about how exciting a movie about the weather on D-Day might be, Maras and Haig take that as a creative challenge, an argumentative stance from which to start. For the next hour and 40 minutes, Maras and co-writer Haig, who also wrote the 2014 play from which the film is adapted, explain to us exactly how important the meteorologists of D-Day were, starting from the high-stakes context of the disastrous D-Day rehearsal Exercise Tiger.
With the weather app at our fingertips these days, it can be hard to imagine just how difficult it was to forecast the weather in the 1940s, especially in Northern Europe. That was the predicament facing Eisenhower (Brendan Fraser) just 72 hours before the planned D-Day launch of June 5, 1944. But we know that D-Day happened on June 6, so the arrival at that date is part of the film\u2019s narrative intrigue.
After a devastating glimpse of Exercise Tiger, red blood mixing with blue ocean waves and white sandy beaches, we\u2019re quickly introduced to our protagonist, Group Captain Chief Meteorologist James Stagg (Andrew Scott), in his cozy home with his pregnant wife before he\u2019s swept into critical war planning.
He\u2019s stern, terse and no-nonsense; Stagg is the kind of person who wants to be correct more than he wants to be liked, and he insists on a careful collection of live data, using weather balloons, phone calls and mathematical charting. His foil is Colonel Irving Krick (Chris Messina), a charming American meteorologist and Eisenhower\u2019s chosen weatherman, a yes-man who relies on selectively chosen historical data, and a persuasive speaker whose approach rankles the fastidious Stagg. Eisenhower instructs the two men to come to an agreement, and \u201cPressure\u201d follows the ups and downs of their working relationship over the course of several days.
But \u201cPressure\u201d is a truly two-hander between Scott and Fraser as Stagg and Eisenhower. Stagg and his firm belief that a storm on June 5 will make conditions less than ideal is the immovable object against which Eisenhower rages, while he simultaneously attempts to placate a phalanx of military personnel who all have different needs. The troops are requisitioned, the destroyers in place, the full moon just right, the secrecy of the invasion delicate. The script \u2014 and Fraser\u2019s explosive performance \u2014 underline the immense, well, pressure the general is under while balancing every precarious element of this enormous mission.
Maras, who is known for another terrific one-setting thriller based on a true story, \u201cHotel Mumbai,\u201d both directs and edits, and his films are put together like precision clockwork, propulsive and relentless, the pulse-pounding pace underlined by Volker Bertelmann\u2019s score. \u201cPressure\u201d is skillfully directed, sweeping us into this world with a kind of addictive immediacy, and is also beautifully shot by cinematographer Jamie Ramsay. Maras and Ramsay make the wise choice to shoot the film with richly saturated color instead of the usual grayish, desaturated look often assigned to period pieces set in this era. It\u2019s not gritty and harsh, but rather stunning and lovely, an eerie contrast to the terror and bloodshed of the day itself.
While Fraser delivers an external performance as the tough American general, Scott offers a restrained depiction of the repressed and methodical Stagg. But when he finally bursts with a cathartic eleventh hour speech about the inaccuracy of Krick\u2019s historical forecast, based on past war trauma, Eisenhower listens. Scott is so good at this kind of acting, processing every emotion internally, but allowing just enough to show to let the audience into his character\u2019s emotional state. It\u2019s wildly compelling to watch.
In a quiet conversation with Eisenhower\u2019s close confidant and aide, Kay Summersby (Kerry Condon), she jokes that weathermen are boring. Stagg reminds her that the weather itself isn\u2019t though. Weather feeds us, it can destroy us \u2014 it rules our existence, he says. \u201cPeople ask, \u2018when will the wind stop blowing?\u2019 No one ever asks, \u2018why does the wind blow? What is the wind?\u2019,\u201d revealing himself as a sort of philosophical poet of the weather. His forecast was the crucial edge in D-Day, and the volatility of the weather is increasingly relevant in our lives, especially with our changing climate. Boring? Never. Thrilling and history-making? Indeed. Maras and Haig easily rise to the challenge to make the weather worth watching.
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Color SchemeSubscriber ActionsStaff OptionsConnect With UsSupport Local Journalism‘Pressure’3.5 stars (out of 4)Credits: Directed by Anthony Maras, starring Brendan Fraser, Andrew Schott, Kerry Condon, Damian Lewis, Henry Ashton and Chris Messina.Rating\/runtime: PG-13 for war violence, bloody images, some strong language, and smoking; 100 minutes.How to watch: In theaters Friday.The premise of \u201cPressure,\u201d the new World War […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":19479,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-19478","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19478","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19478"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19478\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/19479"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19478"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19478"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19478"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}