“Pressure” is the sort of , stoic World War II drama that Hollywood and Britain used to turn out in the days when the World War II generation was still going to the movies.

It’s built on a formula and never deviates from it, with “the war will be lost” stakes and egos and rivalries and histrionics suiting the situation. And this Andrew Maras film of David Haig’s stage play hits all the right notes thanks to a cast headed by Andrew Scott and Oscar winner Brendan Fraser, with Kerry Condon, Chris Messina and Damian Lewis in support.

All these intrigues, all this office politics and all this drama revolves around the weather — storms that may or may not be headed for the English Channel and which could, if Eisenhower’s dueling weather men guess wrong, derail D-Day.

While “the war will be lost” seems like an overstatement coming from one or two characters in the drama, “victory will be delayed” doesn’t sound as stark. But history would be even bloodier and messier has D-Day feels like a solid guess.

The invasion was to open the long-planned “third front” with the U.S., British, Canadian and other troops pushing towards Berlin from the West through France, with the Soviet Union pushing from the East and the Italian campaign grinding north from the South.

Scott plays Group Captain James Stagg, Churchill’s ace meteorologist, summoned by Ike the weekend before D-Day to cover all his bases and confirm the attack, set for June 5, 1944. Eisenhower had his own Cal Tech meteorologist, Irving Krick (Messina, terrific), a name-dropping Hollywood consultant who has called forecasts correctly for Eisenhower all over North Africa and the Mediterranean.

But Krick’s flippancy and “Gone with the Wind” “Burning of Atlanta” weather forecast anecdotes grate on the all-business Flagg. Krick spends his time looking at historical trends, “analogs” from the past to find a matching set of patterns to base a new forecast upon.

In this script, it sounds like Krick should be publisher of The Farmer’s Almanac, which similarly bases “forecasts” on historical patterns.

Flagg? “Get me the DATA,” he snips. As Eisenhower wants “certainty” out of the “one imponderable” about the greatest sea borne invasion in history, only “data” from weather balloons and reporting stations from Nova Scotia to Iceland, Ireland to ships at sea, will tell the story.

Krick has the inside track and an excellent track record. And he has the ear of Eisenhower’s trusted aide and perhaps lover, Kay Sommersby (Condon). The Irishwoman Sommersby is Ike’s gatekeeper. And all the prickly Flagg, who has left his very pregnant wife behind for this long-weekend of weather forecasting, can do is dismiss Sommersby and anybody who doesn’t take his opinion seriously.

Because as he reminds us and Ike time and again, there is no “certainty” about the weather. As Flagg sees looming Atlantic storm systems destined to produce high winds, rain and deep swells at sea, dooming the landings, Krick sees similar storms blocked by a similar Azores high, back in 1904 and 1925.

“In my experience,” Flagg almost sneers, “the weather never replicates its history!”

As anyone who hasn’t forgotten their history knows how this turns out, and remembers the actual date of D-Day, the drama has a preordained predictability about it. But Maras, who gave us the “Hotel Mumbai” terrorist attack historical thriller, teases out the inevitable well and his production team weaves fresh footage, digitally cleaned-up historical footage and CGI to give us a taste of the D-Day that Spielberg mastered in “Saving Private Ryan.”

Fraser, an actor just now hitting his prime, looks enough like Eisenhower in profile for the resemblence to work, and suggests a little of the “public” Eisenhower — steady, steadfast — but a lot more of the private one. This is Ike haunted by the possibility of failure and the losses that came from a D-Day rehearsal exercise just a month before. This Ike has a temper. He bawls out subordinates in front of others, absorbs insults from the arrogant poppinjay Field Marshal Bernard Law Montgomery (Damian Lewis, a tad too tall to play Britain’s favorite bantam rooster general) and relies on Sommersby to be his HQ team eyes and ears as well as access-granting gatekeeper.

Condon’s cagey, controlled performance makes us guess about the veracity of Sommersby’s alleged affair with her boss. This Sommersby is depicted as someone prone to trust gut instincts and personal interactions over methodology and science.

Messina is perfectly cast if you want to make the hustling Krick into your film’s cocky, glib villain. He gives a little color to a character sketched out as an archetype.

But Scott, TV’s “Ripley” and the sensitive heart of “All of Us Strangers,” does the heavy lifting here, a mortal man/weather man who must sublimate his fears at the fate of his pregnant wife and get on with the job of making the most important forecast of his life.

A movie that stands up for science in an age of science-denying charlatans is a blessing.

And this “true story” hews closely enough to the facts to play as history. The one jarring blunder I caught in the dialogue has someone (Monty, I think) refer to the long-awaited “fourth front” he wants to command. How “Band of Brothers” star Lewis let that pass his lips is a mystery. Third front, Monty. THIRD.

World War II seemed exhausted as subject matter some years back. But with much of the world flirting with the fake “strong man” appeal of fascism to solve personal and national problems, “Pressure” renews the importance and timeliness of this as subject matter.

Informed decisions made by rational people calling on the best and the brightest to give them fact-backed opinions and directions seems downright refreshing in an age of jack-booted charlatans, drug addicts and career criminals carrying out their crimes with a gullible public’s blessings.

And letting this mob control “history,” “facts” and the National Weather Service seems like a blunder we’ll be paying for soon enough, perhaps starkly enough to warrant its own movie when this latest cadre of Nazis is vanquished.

Rating: PG-13, violence, smoking, profanity

Cast: Andrew Scott, Brendan Fraser, Kerry Condon, Chris Messina and Damian Lewis.

Credits: Dorected by Anthony Maras, scripted by David Haig and Anthony Maras, based on Haig’s play. A Focus Features release.

Running time: 1:40