The gathering storm: "Pressure"

Well, British film industry, you've really outdone yourself this time. The season's first example of the well-made British period film - it won't be the last - Pressure is a WW2 movie about the weather on D-Day; it could only be more British if it had a subplot about squaddies queuing to get onto the landing crafts, or if the final scene found Paddington standing on a Dover clifftop pointing angrily at the boats. Director Anthony Maras has adapted David Haig's 2014 play about a difficult, semi-forgotten figure who, working against the clock and under the conditions enshrined in that punning title, made a crucial difference in the run-up to the Normandy landings. The figure is Group Captain James Stagg (played here by Andrew Scott), a hypersensitive meteorologist who first shows up at Allied commander Eisenhower's UK base late (his pregnant wife has just been rushed to hospital), snappy and - as his surname seems to suggest - primed for combat. Within moments of his arrival, he's bellowed at a carpenter, turfed Lieutenant Kerry Condon out of her office, and demonstrated a withering disdain for his American equivalent Irving Krick (Chris Messina), a boogie-woogieing flash Harry whose anecdotes from the set of Gone with the Wind - on which Krick advised producer David Selznick - Stagg shoots down in tatters. So: very British film, very British hero - a buttoned-down stickler whose MO, as Eisenhower (Brendan Fraser) leans on him to correctly forecast the conditions for D-Day, gets summarised in an early command he issues to one of his underlings: "Get me the data... That's what counts". Stand down, Paddington: patriotism quota successfully met.

As a film, Pressure seems to be attempting two things simultaneously. The bigger picture forms a Stagg-like rebuke of that "the public are sick of experts" line proposed in the run-up to Brexit by Tory cabinet minister Michael Gove, and demonstrated to be utter horseshit by everything that subsequently came down the pipes. (Gove, by the way, can be observed playing war games for a big fat Sky cheque this very week, the speccy hypocrite.) On a scene-by-scene basis, Maras is trying to make cinematic and involving the work of a Forties equivalent to Ian McCaskill (Stagg even shares the lilting Caledonian accent) or Tomasz Schafernaker. In the matter of the first mission, Pressure proves a resounding success. For the second, the data proves patchier, albeit with bright intervals. This version never quite escapes its theatrical origins, despite Daniel Taylor's high-level production design and plentiful urgent-seeming cutaways to nervy-looking men manning telephones or poring over tidal maps. (It's a notable example of sleeves-rolled-up cinema, and Working Title's budget for braces alone must have been considerable.) But it's well acted by proven pros who mesh well together over these 100 minutes. Isolated in rooms staffed by barking, PT-honed alpha dogs, Scott wisely underplays, drawing us in to some extent. What we observe is that Stagg's prevailing insecurity - professional as much as personal; as he puts it, "you can't be certain about the weather" - was actually his and his country's great strength, obliging him to think beyond the blithe complacency of the slicker Krick and the ill-founded bravado of Damian Lewis's Montgomery. Settling nicely into his second act as a rumpled, lived-in character actor, Fraser fills out an appreciably managerial Eisenhower: a man with a job to do and rank he can pull, but also a willingness to learn from past failures and to hear everybody out if it ensures a better outcome.

Some of its stiffness is built-in: the play hymned analytical rigour, tenacity, holding firm to the facts no matter how disappointing or grim they might be. (Even as Haig and Maras take more than their share of liberties, most obviously with the pregnancy subplot.) Some of it is generic and industrial: even 2021's Operation Mincemeat, which narratively may be as close as the British WW2 movie comes to the business of a caper (or practical joke), felt obliged to play its chosen chapter of history with a very straight bat. (Anything else, presumably, just wouldn't be considered cricket.) Pressure remains watchable without ever becoming especially thrilling: we know the result going in, for starters, while Maras's direction falls somewhere between steady and workmanlike. He pulls off one good sequence as the weather decisively changes on the day initially earmarked for the landings, though even here you're aware you've been watching a British film where, for a long time between shots of old cars and uniforms, the most dramatic setpiece involves a cloudfront coming in. His reluctance to leave second gear does, however, allow him to strike the right balance during the climactic recreation of Normandy, where Stagg's knowledge (and the knowledge of the many other meteorologists) factors into what sports fans refer to as marginal gains: as per Spielberg, if there was a bullet with your name on it, you were clearly a goner, but Stagg helped put enough men onto the beaches at the right time to ultimately turn the tide. The moral would be that science can help shore up democracy, and sometimes proves the difference between life and death. There'll be no showings of Maras's film at the current White House - the screening room was demolished in 2025 so that Gramps can hole up in his ballroom-bunker watching AI slop - but I'd be very interested to hear how Pressure went down with Army families in America's redder states.

Pressure is now showing in cinemas nationwide.