Anthony Maras’ “Pressure”

Movie review by Dennis D. McDonald

PRESSURE is one of those movies where you know what’s going to happen, but the acting, script, and production are so good that you still feel tension despite your knowledge.

General Eisenhower (Brendan Fraser) is leading the planning in England for the D-Day invasion. Meteorologist James Stagg (Andrew Scott) is brought in to predict the weather. Stagg supplants the American meteorologist Irving Krick (Chris Messina), who predicts that the planned invasion day, June 5, will be clear and sunny. Stagg believes otherwise but cannot be 100% certain, and Eisenhower demands certainty. Ike’s aide Kate Summersby (Kerry Condon) is portrayed as playing an intermediary role between Ike and the warring meteorologists.

I don’t know how accurate some of these finer details are, particularly Summersby’s role, but in the scheme of things that doesn’t matter dramatically. We know weather was a major factor in planning D-Day. We know it happened on June 6, and we know about events that occurred before and after. The Allied landing was bloody but successful, and Ike is often quoted as explaining the success by saying, “We had better meteorologists than the Germans.”

The period details in this film are superb. What impressed me the most was the portrayal of how momentous decisions had to be made using such primitive technology for data collection and analysis. All of that data had to be processed and interpreted by recognizable humans operating under enormous pressure.

Acting is uniformly excellent, with Fraser as Ike and Scott as Stagg. Scott stands out; his portrayal of Stagg is totally different from his malevolent Ripley. Fraser’s portrayal of Eisenhower has generated criticism, but we know that Ike was a complex character. One needs to look no farther than Evan Thomas’ portrayal of Ike’s Cold War behavior to understand that.

Kerry Condon has become one of my favorite female actors. Her turns in F1 and Train Dreams as an intelligent woman caught up in male-dominated worlds are impressive.

Review copyright (c) 2026 by Dennis D. McDonald