5 Reasons You Should Watch The Man In The High Castle
4. The Set Design Is Phenomenal
When making a film or television show, the production design is what can make or break your story.
It doesn't matter if you've got the best plot in the world - if you've got actors wearing cardboard or if there's very obvious green screen, viewers will not be able to invest in the world you're creating for them. Just imagine if Thor in the MCU walked around carrying a hammer from B&Q and called it Mjolnir. Wouldn't really work, would it?
The Man In The High Castle achieves a lot of this with its cleverly designed sets, mind blowing CGI, and incredibly well thought out costume design. If you watch some of the behind the scenes clips you can find on YouTube, it's frankly unbelievable what is and isn't CGI.
A lot of this involves simply using 1960s cars and making everyone wear period-appropriate garments, but they pale in comparison to the shots of this alternate world's New York and Berlin, where the Volkshalle towers over the city (which is actually based on a design Adolf Hitler made up).
The more famous image, of course, is the slightly less believable rebuilt Statue of Liberty in New York, which is now sporting a swastika sash and performing a Nazi salute.
The uniforms of the slightly more modern German and Japanese armies feel completely believable and added with everything else breathes life and terror into this horrible dystopian world. Seeing these once feared armies carrying modern weapons adds to the terrible situation this world as in and helps to show how lucky we are in our own world.
Due to the subject matter, it's understandable why there isn't really merchandise for the show; but that doesn't mean you can't appreciate just how much effort went into the crafting of this surreal alternate world.