10 Potentially Awful 2014 Movies That Turned Out Great

3. Snowpiercer

Why it could have been awful: Just as Locke posed the question of whether or not a film could pull off being set entirely inside a moving car, so too with Snowpiercer did the single setting - in this instance a moving train - raise questions as to how successfully this setting could be exploited. When you factored in the basic plot, in which the lower class inhabitants of the train rise up against their affluent masters (a story we've been told countless times before), it was understandable that many would assume Snowpiercer would turn out to be a predictable, throwaway science fiction movie. Why it's great: Anyone doubting whether a film could make the inside of a train visually interesting clearly had these doubts squashed by the time Snowpiercer finished - the direction exploited every possible angle of the confined interiors while the production designer did a wonderfully evocative job of depicting the social stratification, as the revolution gathers momentum and moves its way from the rear to the front of the train. While the plot might not have offered anything strikingly new to the concept, it's so fast-paced and ambitious in its scope that audiences were happy going along for the ride.