My Award Nominations: Best Production Design

I tell ya, it broke my heart to omit just about every title that you'll see in the 'just missed' section of this post, but that's the type of year it's been for production design. Outstanding work in too many films. I ultimately had to choose those whose sets and environments were engrained into the narrative identities of the stories they were telling, but it doesn't make it any easier to snub some other worthy effort.

Anyway, enough mourning the snubbees. Onto the five that did survive this brutally competitive melee for only five slots in Best Production Design.

Review - Snowpiercer

The notion that everybody has their preordained place in life, and that stepping beyond one's bounds leads to a collapse in social order, is probably not a popular opinion in our modern world. It's ironic then that this would be one of the themes central to Snowpiercer, the latest effort from Korean auteur Bong Joon-ho, a director who so defies categorization that it's impossible to imagine what his bounds would be, even if he ever had any. Never content to coast on a set track, he has delivered another singular and unique cinematic achievement, albeit an imperfect one.

Based on the French graphic novel Le Transperceneige, Snowpiercer is set in a post-apocalyptic future in which a radical atmospheric treatment intended to combat the effects of global warming has resulted in a new ice age, and the mass extinction of virtually all life on Earth. The only survivors of this cataclysmic cold snap are those who happened to be on board the Snowpiercer, a life-preserving locomotive that now circles the frozen world in perpetuity.