At this point in cinematic history, making a film about D-Day should be considered a fool’s errand. As everyone knows, the opening combat sequence of the invasion of Omaha Beach within Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan established a landmark for depicting war on screen. The Golden Age spectacle is replaced with grim carnage, with faceless soldiers falling by the hundreds as body parts mix with the water and waves of the beach. Almost twenty minutes later, we’re finally allowed to breathe again, and our fists begin to unclench. No one has and likely never will try to reproduce that moment on that scale ever again, as Spielberg and his crew set the bar at an unassailable height.

This is all to say that it was extremely smart of director/co-writer Anthony Maras to set his D-Day film, Pressure, away from the beaches and into the sky. The film still starts with its own view of carnage, this time a bird’s-eye view of Exercise Tiger in April 1944, one of the Allied rehearsals for the eventual invasion of Normandy. “It was a catastrophe,” reads the opening titles, with the result being the death of nearly a thousand troops, plummeting Allied morale as to whether they would be able to establish a foothold on the Northern European front.

Only a few weeks removed from that embarrassment, the Allied forces are already pushing headstrong into their planned invasion. Monday, June 5th, is the penciled-in date, with nearly 5,000 ships and 200,000 troops set to descend upon the Nazi war machine. All that's needed now to turn that pencil into a pen is a forecast, which has been personally tasked to the Scottish meteorologist James Stagg (Andrew Scott) by General Dwight Eisenhower (Brendan Fraser). The readings Stagg produces will directly influence Eisenhower’s decision to order the invasion, essentially placing the fate of the free world in his hands (and maps).

That last sentence about the weight that the 72 hours before the fateful day will carry throughout history is heavily bolded, underlined, and repeated throughout Maras and co-writer David Haig’s screenplay. Several speeches are given about how history will remember this moment, and that millions of lives hang in the balance. It’s all true, but it’s also a lot of preaching to the choir, just as the first opening title states that “this is a true story.” Duh. Fraser isn’t always the best actor to deliver these lines; his sensitive voice and big eyes oversell everything into schmaltz.

Those same features prevent him from carrying the gruffness required of a military authority, which he sometimes has to do as he wrestles with Stagg’s inability to agree with his meteorological coworker, Irving Krick (Chris Messina). A symptom of this film being based on Haig’s 2014 play of the same name is that a lot of it takes place in a central location as army men argue about the weather. Jet streams, upper atmosphere pressure, surface air temperature, cloud shapes, and wave depths are just a few of the terms thrown around as Krick maintains his position that June 5th will be calm and sunny, and Stagg adamantly believes that the day will be ruled by heavy storms that will guarantee an Allied defeat.

Messina’s cavalier Americanism butts against Scott’s stiffness. Stagg prefers facts over feelings; the latter he quashes repeatedly as he orders his staff to collect mountains of data from all over the world. Krick’s use of past precedent to predict future results is labeled moronic by Stagg in a scene that would normally burn much hotter if we didn’t already know who the right side of this argument was. For as much as this inherently nerdy scenario punches way above its weight class in terms of dramatic tension, there is always the hanging feeling of knowing how this all turns out.

Luckily, Maras’ placement of the Omaha Beach landings at the end of the film offers a new layer of context. Our eyes are no longer solely fixated on the ground as men lay dying; they also look to the sky in gratitude for the tolerable weather that was afforded to them. Produced by Working Title Films and distributed by Focus Features, the makers of such prestige fare like Darkest Hour, The Danish Girl, and Mary Queen of Scots, Pressure looks and sounds just as commanding as its subject. Volker Bertelmann’s charging score is mightily similar to Conclave, which is almost exactly what I said about A House of Dyanmite just last fall. Hey, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

Focus Features will release Pressure in theaters nationwide on May 29th.