"Pressure" - What do you know about pressure?

Does anybody actually like talking about the weather? I don't mean extreme weather like tornadoes or blizzards. I mean the kind of weather that dominates almost all small talk, especially after your older relatives run out of personal ailments to describe to you in excruciating detail. I'm sure you've been on a call with someone and they inevitably asked "How's the weather out there?" Ugh. Hearing that question makes me cringe the same way as when someone says "are we having fun yet?" as they walk past me in the hall at work. So...let's talk about Pressure, an entire movie centered on talking about the weather.

Ok, Pressure isn't just one hundred minutes about of a bunch of guys talking about the weather. It's one hundred minutes about a bunch of guys arguing about the weather. I realize that sounds as boring as a graduation ceremony or the movie Fences. But they aren't arguing about just any weather. They are arguing about the weather expected for Operation Overlord, a.k.a. D-Day. That's much better than listening to your uncle describe how the rain makes his knees hurt.

I've said in the past how much I appreciate movies that depict historical events, especially events I know nothing about. Pressure is one such movie - I had never heard that D-Day was postponed by one day, let alone that it was postponed due to weather forecasts. Dr. James Stagg (Andrew Scott) is tasked with leading a team that would gather weather data and provide a weather forecast for the invasion day to General Dwight D. Eisenhower (Brendan Fraser). This was no small responsibility, as the invasion included paratroopers, naval landings, and air cover - all of which could be led to catastrophe in bad enough conditions. Conditions like high waves, high wind, dense cloud cover. During a scene depicting a meeting between Stagg, Eisnehower, and several other high ranking military leaders, all will be made clear.

Like any historical drama film, there are a few liberties taken with the story to heighten the suspense. And a film about weather forecasting absolutely needs that thumb on the scale. It's the weather. The primary liberty is that Stagg is brought in to lead the team just seventy-two hours before the invasion. In the real world, he had been working with the team for months. But drama works best with a clock, and there isn't a better way to build drama than to bring in an outsider at the eleventh hour to save the day.

Also on the team is Irving Krick (Chris Messina) and he is the polar opposite of Stagg. Krick is a flashy American with a magnetic personality whom everyone likes. He believes the best way to forecast is to compare current conditions with historical data to predict what will happen. Conversely, Stagg is a brusque, no-nonsense Scotsman whom everyone finds to be disagreeable. He believes the best way to forecast is to collect as much data about current conditions as possible, analyze the data to predict what will happen, and to constantly remind everyone that the weather in Northern Europe doesn't give a crap what happened in the past. At one point, he will literally call Krick's methodology moronic, and Krick's indignation is so palpable you can almost taste it.

That's the beauty of this movie. It pits these two men against each other in a very short window of time, each of them trying to convince Eisenhower they are the smartest guy in the room. The suspense builds really well, particularly every time they show the sun shining as Stagg is adamantly stressing how poor the weather will be when it matters. And to top it off, there are some good supporting performances from Fraser, as well as Kerry Condon as Eisenhower’s aide, and Damian Lewis as British Field Marshall Bernard Montgomery. And that’s what I know about Pressure.

Rating: Don’t ask for any money back and, like always with these movies, go read more about history.

“1917” - Can you handle the truth?

If you are into war movies, there are two major ones from which to get your fix. By now, you probably already saw Midway and, depending on what city you live in, might have seen 1917 as well. If not, you are waiting with bated breath for January 10 to get here, which is when 1917 rolls out everywhere. And, I sympathize with you because Midway was not what one might describe as good. Rather, it is what one might describe as “definitely a movie,” or even “the opposite of how to make an interesting movie.”

War movies tend to be really good when the plot is narrowly focused on a specific event. For those of you who have seen neither Midway nor 1917 (or their associated previews), one is focused on a specific event and the other covers several events that take place over a significant amount of time. Based on title, you would assume Midway is the specific one. There was only one Battle of Midway during WWII, so the movie has to focus on that, right? Conversely, 1917 is an entire year of the Great War, in which at least three major battles were fought. Surely, the film will give us a look at the horrors of that year, including the Battle of Cambrai, which was the first time battle tanks were used on a massive scale. If you haven’t already guessed, the opposite is true of both films.

(Side note: Midway should have followed in Dunkirk’s footsteps, but chose to follow in Pearl Harbor’s footsteps. Even worse, Midway didn’t even have great special effects. But enough about Midway; that is not why you are here.)

If you have never seen pictures or heard first or second-hand descriptions of WWI battlefields, think of your worst nightmare, feed that nightmare into a meat grinder, then double it. What little we were taught about WWI in school probably included trench warfare, covered the deployment of new weapons like airplanes, machine guns, and tanks, and briefly described the space between opposing trenches (no-man’s land) as a mess of barbed wire and land mines and thousands of flying bullets and artillery shells. Maybe, just maybe, you had a teacher who also mentioned the bodies that littered no-man’s land, but probably only in the context of a lot of men dying whenever one side would order its men to charge the other side’s line. They never got into the facts that retrieving bodies from no-man’s land was next to impossible, the massive use of modern artillery and chemical weapons left a maelstrom of craters filled with people/poison soup, or that many of those suicidal charges involved horse-mounted cavalry. The point is do not eat any food while watching 1917.

That is not wood floating in the river next to him.

1917 corrects the error of American history classes by showing us that nightmare. British Lance Corporals Schofield (George MacKay) and Blake (Dean-Charles Chapman) are ordered to make their way nine miles forward to warn a 1600-man brigade that is unwittingly marching into a trap. Like them, our immediate question is how they make it a dozen steps before being mowed down. Don’t worry, their commanding officer (Colin Firth) assures them. Aerial surveillance shows the Germans have retreated to lines further back and that the duo can cross no-man’s land safely. The surveillance is also how they know about the trap. Pshaw (or bollocks), we say in unison with Lieutenant Leslie (Andrew Scott). Leslie tells them where they can cross the barbed wire (directions which include “cross through at the horse”), while simultaneously assuring them they will die. Oh, and don’t fall into the craters because we know they are half-filled with water and nobody knows how deep they are. This is half of the recipe for the movie-long tension that begins the moment the men peek their heads above the rim of their trench.

You want to go out there on purpose?

The other half, as my Ruthless colleague John has discussed, is the lack of film cuts throughout the film. Director Sam Mendes wanted to build the tension and realism by putting the audience into the trenches, no-man’s land, and gutted towns with Schofield and Blake and removing cuts is a great way of doing that. You probably have never consciously noticed that a cut allows you take let your breath out or blink your eyes, artificially releasing a bit of tension and momentarily pulling you out from whatever film you are watching. About five minutes into 1917, I realized there had not been a cut yet (for reference, the average length of a shot is 2.5 seconds) and that my eyes were really, really dry. I did my best to look for them, but it was really difficult once the meat grinder was on full display. There are plenty of clever ways to hide cuts, but they just weren’t there. What was there were Black and Schofield crawling through mud, barbed wire, and craters filled with rancid liquids, rats, and body parts and rotting faces glaring at them for having the audacity to not also be dead. Oh, and the horses the dead rode in on.

Cut me a break already.

Since Mendes did everything possible to make the film appear as one long cut, the tension almost never breaks. Like the two corporals, we are expecting bullets to fly at any moment. For one of them to step on a land mine. For an artillery shell to explode. For Germans to be around every corner. Even worse, and just like in life, nothing happens when you expect it to, instead happening out of sync. If I chewed my fingernails when I got nervous, I would have nothing left below the elbows.

Like Saving Private Ryan and other great war films, 1917 works because the war is the setting instead of the plot. We can experience the war by observing it with Blake and Schofield. For this film and for our benefit, they channel the experience of the entire Allied army.  As they navigate the obstacles of the war to accomplish their mission, not only do we see all of those things we learned about in school (tanks, trenches, biplanes, artillery, death), but we see all of the things no one told us about. The simple plot of two men risking their lives in a suicide mission for the greater good is a far better story than trying to cram half of WWII into a two-hour Midway, I mean movie.

Rating: Do not ask for any money back and don’t forget to unclench.