Seventy-two hours before D-Day, Group Captain James Stagg (Andrew Scott) is summoned to Southwick House to provide General Eisenhower (Brendan Fraser) with perhaps the most important weather forecast of all time. Will conditions be suitable for the largest seaborne invasion ever assembled?

Pressure is a well staged, taut drama that never really escapes its roots as a play or the fact that its pivotal story details are a crucial and well known historical fact. Your enjoyment of it will be based on a few specific details. Do you love WWII history and are clamouring for more films on the subject? Are you excited to see Andrew Scott and Brendan Fraser deliver powerhouse performances in a film with historically accurate costumes and sets? Or do you simply not know when D-Day was?

The set up feels almost too cliché to be real. Meteorologist Irving P. Krick, played by Chris Messina, is the brash overconfident American who bases his forecasts on historical weather charts, on the basis that he believes the past can predict the future. On the other hand, the stoic Stagg believes that the weather in the North Atlantic is more complex and that you must use all available data to predict what is to come, and even then it is never an exact science. Eisenhower is the commanding leader looking for certainty in the face of sending thousands of men to their possible deaths and caring Kay Summersby (Kerry Condon) acts as the intermediary between the posturing men.

The result is some rather compelling two-handed scenes between the various protagonists where they wrestle both with their own uncertainties and fears whilst trying to be more right than each other. Damien Lewis even joins the fun as another alpha male, playing Bernard Montgomery, Commander in Chief of the Army. And there is a completely made up, for extra drama, storyline involving Stagg’s pregnant wife. All of which is neatly suffused with montages of people looking busy, shuffling papers, taking phone calls and drawing weather charts.

When it is good, it is largely due to Andrew Scott and Brendan Fraser giving their characters the sort of extra depth that makes you realise the weight of the decisions at hand. Whilst technically its attention to detail should also be lauded, especially the original World War II footage that has been upscaled, colourised and inserted seamlessly into the film. Largely though, it is just a well made drama that relies on those key performances to differentiate it from a crowd of other well made war films.