Pressure
With a few days to go to D-Day, a meteorologist (Andrew Scott) is tasked with predicting the weather and deciding whether sending the landing craft over the channel is a go or a no-go. He has an angry General Eisenhower (Brendan Fraser) to report back to.
The trailer for this film was playing in the cinema recently and became a bit of a running joke amongst our friends. It’s so boring, feels like it’s 10 minutes long, and seems to give away the entire story in one sitting. And you checked out so long ago you can’t even remember what the name of the film was. So how did the actual film turn out?
Well, not terrible. As you might expect, it holds absolutely zero surprises in store and rests its entire stakes on the drama of the true story. It makes for a dreary first half as they desperately try to establish their characters as ‘tough but smart’ or ‘charismatic but foolish’, before dropping all that pretence and getting down to business. Once we’re in full swing it’s a compelling enough drama, with great performances to rope you into a story that is ultimately about data coming down the phone line.
They omitted a few key characters from reality, changed the order of events ever slightly to try and make for a little twist at the end, and totally omitted seeing the weather debate from the Nazi point of view. You always have to make room for artistic licence in these things, but it strikes me that the reality of the events would have made for a better film.
In fairness to the makers of Pressure, if The Imitation Game1 picked up a load of Oscar nominations then so should this. That’s faint praise perhaps but ‘faint praise’ is probably what this deserves.