The perks of owning your own business: You can see the movie Pressure at 12:45PM on a Tuesday!
Pressure is the movie about D-Day in World War II and how an accurate weather forecast changed the course of history. It really did. D-Day was supposed to be on June 5th. It ended up being June 6th.
Here’s my (Joe Martucci’s) take.
POSITIVES
The weather terms they used were accurate.
They really showed *how* much time and effort it took into forecasting. Back in the 1940s, there were no weather satellites, no weather radar and weather models took longer to run a forecast than the forecast hour itself. The movie showed a weather team of about 10 taking in calls about observations across the North Atlantic. Today, one person at a computer could get all of that info across.
The tension between the American forecast and Scottish forecast was real. Capt. Krick used analogs to forecast future weather. That was a TON of work. He literally had to match up current conditions to all previous weather charts. Then, project forward for the forecast. That takes minutes with AI.
Like the movie said, his method of forecasting worked in North Africa. The weather is more constant there. In Northern Europe, Dr. Stagg’s method was better.
The way Dr. Stagg gave his forecasts was PERFECT. Gen. Eienhower asked multiple sure if he was absolutely certain the stormy forecast would hold. He said no. We are predicting the future, not writing history. We can have high confidence but you’ll never have 100% accuracy, especially given it was 3 days out with 1940s tech.
NOT SO GOOD
Some historical context was off. The rain actually started coming in on June 3rd, two days before the proposed June 5th date. The movie had it raining on June 4th.
Dr. Stagg never recommended June 18th as the next possible D-Day.
OVERALL: This is up there with The Perfect Storm on the most weather accurate movies I’ve ever seen. I recommend!
You can stream Pressure on Apple TV! Most movie theatres will end the airing of Pressure on June 19, 2026.
