Pressure; A Movie About America Saving the World (Again)

Pressure, the motion picture based on the 2015 play of the same name, is a “man versus nature” story about Eisenhower’s meteorology department in the final hours leading up to the D-Day invasion. But I have to ask, what is this movie for, and why do we need it now?

You can watch the trailer below:

I’m not trying to be negative, but my very first knee-jerk impression was that Brendan Fraser is miscast as the general. Eisenhower was a wiry WWII, and Fraser seems just a bit too portly. I noticed that all of the shots of him shown in the trailer were at chest-level, not unlike what was done with Marlon Brando in Apocalypse Now (see my review of that movie here). For some reason, for the entirety of the trailer, Fraser looks like someone just threw onions in his face and he’s trying not to sneeze.

Another potential problem is there seems to be a lot of yelling and shouting. Hollywood just seems very out of touch with how people act in real life, particularly in war. Compare the acting in this trailer to how people behave in iconic films like The Longest Day or A Bridge Too Far. There are definitely some tense moments, but people aren’t constantly waiving their arms around shouting at each other during the mission, let alone at headquarters. An officer is supposed to be able to control himself, even during disagreements.

Then of course there’s the usual artificially inflating the stakes that we might “lose the war” if D-Day fails. I don’t think anyone (at least on the allied side) by mid-1944 thought there was a danger of losing. The Axis powers were on the back foot everywhere from Eastern Europe to the Pacific. Not to say there weren’t very high stakes, and many thousands of lives at risk, but the “If it weren’t for America, you would be speaking German” trope that has to get thrown into every movie is tiring.

And why now? Well, we do have Trump as president, so we’re back to the usual chest thumping, as opposed to the Biden administration, who seemed embarrassed to even mention D-Day or WWII (except to say the Soviets were bad), and were also quite preoccupied with convincing Germany to re-militarize. It is also important to remind American youth that they need to die for Israel defeat fascism.

So I guess we are back to traditional cringe, rather than woke cringe. America first and all that.

Ian Kummer

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