William Gibson on Cloverfield

Writer William Gibson on Cloverfield:

I saw Cloverfield last night, and nothing about it bugged me more than those quotes around "Central Park" on the DoD evidence tag that opens the film. It immediately tells us that this film has not been made by native science fiction minds. If Central Park is no longer called Central Park, but is officially referred to as "the area formerly known as 'Central Park'", but the DoD still exists, we know that this is not a *far-future* evidence tag. So if Central Park is now known as "The Killing Fields", or "The Ghastly Black Glass Ocean", then *tell* us. Those quotes are extraordinarily clumsy (and the card itself is typographically unconvincing).

I think it’s obvious why the makers of the film did this. Simply put, Cloverfield is not a film made for a science fiction audience. Its audience is the general public ($41 million bucks opening weekend) - people by whom this subtlety is missed, and who benefit from the context provided by the name of a familiar location. While not entirely accurate, this little bit of information immediately says to an audience, “This place you know and which carries strong emotional connotations for you no longer exists,” while “The Killing Fields” just says, “Some place, somewhere on Earth, something bad or weird happened.”

Are the quotes clumsy? Yes. Is the card typographically unconvincing? Certainly. But no more so than *asterisks* around words meant to be emphasized and the use of dumb quotes (which I lovingly call stupid quotes).