The Clockwork Penguin

Daniel Binns is a media theorist and filmmaker tinkering with the weird edges of technology, storytelling, and screen culture. He is the author of Material Media-Making in the Digital Age and currently writes about posthuman poetics, glitchy machines, and speculative media worlds.

Category: Hollywood Cinema

  • Godzilla: King of the Franchises

    If you like what’s going on here at The Clockwork Penguin, if you appreciate the cut of my particular jib, as it were, buy me a coffee!

    A film still from Godzilla vs Kong (2021), featuring Godzilla filling the frame from the torso up. It is raining heavily, so we can't see much detail of Godzilla's face, but we can clearly see blue lightning running along the spines on his back.
    Godzilla with the spicy lightning as depicted in Godzilla vs. Kong (2021).

    The 2014 reboot/continuation/expansion of the Godzilla franchise opens with the standard mystery box. A helicopter flies low over a jungle landscape, there are low minor chords from a rumbling orchestra: dissonance, uncertainty, menace. Helicopter Passenger #1 turns to Helicopter Passenger #2: “They found something.”

    This is the germ of what is now a multi-film franchise, with a spin-off TV series that debuted in late 2023. A few weeks ago, I re-watched Gareth Edwards’ 2014 reboot, as well as the sequel films I hadn’t seen, Godzilla II: King of the Monsters and Godzilla vs. Kong.

    It was a bit of fun, obviously, a last hurrah before I went back to the very serious business of media academicking, but as is wont to happen, it’s been stewing ever since. So here: have some little thoughts on big monsters.


    Last week I Masta’d1 up some speculations as to why Argylle has flopped. The first and most obvious reason that a film might tank is that it’s just not a very good film, as this may well be true of Argylle. But in a time where cinema is dead and buried and a media object is never discrete, we can’t look at the film in a vacuum.

    I have thoughts on why #Argylle flopped. I haven’t seen it, so I won’t go into any great depth, but suffice to say there are two major components:

    1) Marvel killed transmedia storytelling, jumped around on the corpse, drove a steamroller over it, then buried it in a nuclear waste facility.

    2) Camp doesn’t hit like it used to. Big ensemble campy treats aren’t as sweet now; in an age of hyper-sensitivity, broad knowledge and information access, they taste a little sour. Ain’t no subtext anymore.2

    The marketing machine behind Argylle decided they’d play a little game, by teasing a novel written by a mystery author (both in terms of them not being well-known, but also an author of actual mystery), with the film being quickly picked up for production. This was fairly clumsily-done, but leaving that to one side: okay, cool idea. The conceit is that the author runs into the real-life equivalent of one of their characters who whisks them away on an adventure. Cue ideas of unreliable narration, possible brainwashing, or whatever, and there’s the neat little package.

    The concept overall is solid, but Universal and Apple made the mistake of thinking they could shoehorn this concept into a campaign that ‘tricked’ the audience into thinking some of it was factual, or at least had some tenuous crossover with reality.

    Basically, they tried an old-school transmedia campaign.

    Transmedia storytelling has always been around in some form or another. It dovetails quite nicely with epistolary and experimental narratives, like Mary Shelley’s original Frankenstein, and discussions of transmedia also work well when you’re thinking about serial stories or adaptations. The term is most often attributed to Henry Jenkins, a wonderful and kindly elder scholar who was thinking about the huge convergence of media technologies occasioned by the wide adoption of the internet in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

    Jenkins’ ur-example of transmedia is The Matrix franchise, “a narrative so large that it cannot be contained within a single medium.”3 The idea is that in order to truly appreciate the narrative as a whole, the audience has to follow up on all the elements, be they films, video games, comic books, or whatever.

    “Each franchise entry needs to be self-contained so you don’t need to have seen the film to enjoy the game, and vice versa. Any given product is a point of entry into the franchise as a whole. Reading across the media sustains a depth of experience that motivates more consumption.”4

    This model is now far from unique in terms of marketing or storytelling; with the MCU, DC Universe, the Disneyfied Star Wars universe and others, we have no dearth of complex narratives and storyworlds to choose from. This is maybe now partly why transmedia is seen as, at best, a little dated, old hat, and at worst, a bit of a dirty word, when it comes to narrative, media, or cinema studies. Those still chipping away at the transmedia stoneface are seen as living in the past or worse, wasting their time. I don’t think it’s a waste of time, nor do I necessarily see it as living in the past; it’s just that transmedia is media now.

    Every new media commodity, be it a film, an app, a game, a platform, novel, has a web of attendant media commodities spring up around it. Mostly these are used for marketing, but occasionally these extraneous texts may relay some plot point or narrative element. The issue is that you need to conceit to be front and centre, you need some idea of the full narrative; you can’t expect the audience to want to do anything. The producers of Argylle made this mistake. They did transmedia the old-fashioned way, where narrative elements are spread across discrete media objects (e.g. book and film), and they expected the audience to want to fill in the gaps, and to share their excitement at having done so… on social media, I guess?

    But like transmedia storytelling, social media ain’t what she used to be. Our present internet is fragmented, hyper-platformed, paywalled; city-states competing for dominance, for annexation (acquisition), for citizens or slaves (subscribers). Content is still king, but the patrician’s coffers care not as to whether that content is produced by the finest scribes of the age, or the merchant guild’s new automatons.

    Viral is still viral, popular is still popular, but the propagation of content moves differently. Hashtags, likes, views don’t mean much anymore. You want people talking, but you only care as much as it gets new people to join your platform or your service. Get new citizens inside the gates, then lock and bar the gates behind them; go back to the drawing board for the next big campaign. The long tail is no more; what matters is flash in the pan attention attacks.


    The producers behind the Godzilla reboot clearly envisioned a franchise. This is clear enough from how the film ends (or more accurately, where it stops talking, and the credits are permitted to roll). Godzilla apparently saves the world (or at least Honolulu and Las Vegas) from another giant monster, then disappears into the sea, leaving humanity to speculate as to its motivations.

    It’s also apparent that the filmmakers didn’t want a clean break from the cultural history, themes or value of the broader Godzilla oeuvre; the title sequence suggests that the 1954 Castle Bravo tests were actually an operation to destroy Godzilla5. And in the film’s prologue, this wonderful shot is presented with virtually no context.

    A film still from Godzilla (2014), with a Lego model of the Saturn V rocket in the foreground, and a poster of Godzilla in the background.
    American triumphalism meets Japanese… er, monster promotions?

    What struck me most, though, is the lack of overt story-bridges, particularly in the first film. Story-bridges are parts of the plot, e.g. characters, events, images, that allow the audience to jump off to another part of the narrative. These jumping-off points can be explicit, e.g. an end-credits sequence, or a line of dialogue referring to a past/future event, or they can be implied, e.g. the introduction of a character in a minor role that may participate more prominently in other media.

    As media franchises become more complex, these points/bridges are not as often modelled as connecting branches to nodes around a centred point (a tentpole film, for instance), but as a mesh that connects multiple, interconnected tentpole media. In some of my academic work, with my colleagues Vashanth Selvadurai and Peter Vistisen, we’ve explored how Marvel attempts to balance this complexity:

    “[Marvel] carefully balances production by generating self-contained stories for the mass audience, which include moments of interconnectivity in some scenes to fortify the MCU and thereby accommodate the fan base… [T]he gradual scaling up in bridge complexity from characters to storyworld to a cohesive storyline is integrated into a polycentric universe of individual transmedia products. These elements are not gathered around one tentpole event that the audience has to experience before being able to make sense of the rest.”4

    In Godzilla, the story-bridges are more thematic, even tonal. The story remains consistently about humanity’s desire to control the natural world, and that world’s steadfast resistance to control; multiple times we hear the scientist Ishiro Serizawa (Ken Watanabe) speak about ‘balance’ in nature, the idea of a natural equilibrium that humanity has upset, and that Godzilla and his kin will restore. There is also a balance within and between humanity; corporate greed, political power struggles, individual freedoms and restrictions, all vie to find a similar kind of equilibrium, if such a thing is possible. The resulting tone is one that feels universal but prescient; topical and relevant to the contemporary moment, despite the presence of enormous monsters.

    This tone is carried over into Godzilla: King of the Monsters. The monsters multiply in this instalment, and an extraterrestrial element is introduced, but in general Godzilla’s animal motivation is about preservation of self, but also of Earth and its biology. I should also note that there are more explicit bridges in this film, like the characters of Dr. Serizawa and his colleague Dr. Vivienne Graham (Sally Hawkins). But the true connecting thread, at least for me, is this repeated theme of humans and our puny power struggles playing out against the backdrop of a deep time, a history, forces and powers so ancient that we can never really understand them.

    This macro-bridge, if you like, allows the filmmakers to then make tweaks to the micro-elements of the story. If they want or need to adjust the character focus, they can. If the plot of a single film seems a little rote, maybe, or they want to try something different, they’ve given themselves enough space in the story and the story-world to do that. This may not necessarily be intentional, but it certainly appears as an effective counter-model to the MCU/Disney mode, where everything seems over-complicated and planned out in multi-year phases, and everything is so locked in. The MonsterVerse approach is one of ad hoc franchise storytelling, and the result is a universe that feels more free, more open: full of possibilities and untold stories.

    The point of all of this, I suppose, is to let us see what works and what doesn’t. As a storyteller or creative type, it helps me to model and test approaches to storytelling of all scales and budgets, as I think about what kinds of narratives I want to develop, and in which media form. Beyond that, though, I think that as we move into a contentscape that muddles the human-made with the computer-generated, this kind of analysis and discussion is more essential than ever.


    Notes & References

    1. Still working out the vernacular for the new social web. ↩︎
    2. Me, on Mastodon, February 6, 2024. ↩︎
    3. Jenkins, H. (2006). Convergence culture: Where old and new media collide. New York University Press, p. 95. ↩︎
    4. Jenkins, Convergence culture, p. 96. ↩︎
    5. The first Godzilla film, directed by Ishirō Honda, was also released in 1954 ↩︎
    6. Selvadurai, V., Vistisen, P., & Binns, D. (2022). Bridge Complexity as a Factor in Audience Interaction in Transmedia Storytelling. Journal of Asia-Pacific Pop Culture, 7(1), 85–108 (quote from pages 96-7). https://doi.org/10.5325/jasiapacipopcult.7.1.0085 ↩︎
  • Awaiting Awakens

    george-lucas

    It’s been hard for me to focus today.

    Technically it’s a work day — the place I work for doesn’t close down for the Christmas break until December 23. For better or worse, though, the primary element of my role — teaching — wrapped up at the end of October. Grading assessments brought me up to mid-November, but then it’s been working through a random assortment of things I’d been putting off for the rest of the year. Largely research and getting on top of reading for supervisions.

    Which means I’ve had a lot of thinking time. Probably too much.

    Today is December 16. Midnight tomorrow (12am December 17) sees me enter a cinema, don some 3D glasses and strap in for Star Wars: The Force Awakens.

    Those who know me know that I’ve been a fan of Star Wars forever. I wore out the Special Edition VHS tapes as a kid, then bought up each new iteration as it was released (warts, badly-composited womp rats, NOOOOOOOOOO’s, and all). I’ve written elsewhere about how Star Wars was an escape, and it was. It helped me through a lot. It was that escape, that fantasy, that security blanket, that everyone needs and deserves.

    As I’ve gotten (a little) older, I’ve become more invested in how this pop culture behemoth has taken over the popular consciousness. While I would never ever consider authoring anything academic about the franchise (though I have mentioned it on occasion, only as an example), it’s been really great to see that excitement about these films that are so special to me has not waned in some 40 odd years.

    I’m not particularly concerned about the new film. I have a lot of time for JJ Abrams as a person and a director, which might shock some of my students. I have next to no expectations, beyond my wish for a good time. You’d think I’d expect more, given my extended fanship, but honestly I am a little over the whingers. Han Shot First, fan theories, despecialized editions, the list goes on. A great deal of George Lucas’s pain over the last thirty years comes down to fans thinking they own the franchise when, honestly, they don’t. They never have.

    Now, let’s be clear: I think a lot of the changes Lucas has made over the years have resulted in poorer films. But jumping up and down won’t change anything. Sadly, said jumping up and down has resulted in an entire social network: Tumblr. I like Tumblr, it’s a fun place to be, but it can also be exhausting.

    Tangent time: in the last 24 hours I’ve listened to the entire run of the podcast Limetown. It’s a fictional story in the style of investigative/story-based podcasts like This American Life and Serial (though there is speculation Limetown was produced before the latter was release). It’s a short and engaging story (six episodes of about 25 mins each) in the vein of Fringe or The Twilight Zone, and makes exceptional use of the format in order to develop characters and tension. After some discussion with the good friend who put me on to the show, I decided to investigate a little further into some of the unresolved story threads. Reddit didn’t let me down. Hundreds of seemingly unimportant references and words are ripped to shreds by fans who have listened to each episode ten or more times. While there is a tendency to label uber-fans as obsessives or ‘weird’ (per Jenkins), I can’t help but admire their dedication to this thing that they’ve found that they love. Some of the discussions, though, led to some fans defending an idea that was entirely based on speculation. Fans of podcasts are generally a genial bunch, so it never got nasty, but there were moments where, with other cultural artefacts, it’s gotten very ugly.

    Again, it comes down to ownership. I see no harm in throwing theories out there, speculating on what might happen, or collectively bemoaning adjustments to a beloved franchise, but adoration/love/fandom does not equal ownership. Limetown and Star Wars do not belong to us. They are the genuine artistic creations of a series of individuals who should be praised for having the skills and the guts to put it together and put it out into the world.

    It was gratifying to read that George Lucas had received a standing ovation at the premiere of The Force Awakens earlier in the week. And in the latest episode of Imaginary Worlds, Eric Molinsky dissects the Han Shot First debate, couching it in not dissimilar terms to those I’ve used above. One quote really stuck with me, and in many ways inspired this epic rant of mine:

    “We shouldn’t be too proud of this technological terror we’ve constructed, and by that I mean Twitter. Because at a certain point filmmakers need to have leeway to make bold creative choices so the franchise can breathe and grow and not be just a big nostalgia trip.”

    I had a lot of feels about Jurassic World. But, in hindsight, kudos to the rights-holders for giving Colin Trevorrow the go-ahead to introduce new characters and stories (and, sadly, dinosaurs) into this world we know and love. Jurassic World was a failed experiment, but without failure there would be no success. I think The Force Awakens will prove that such revivals, reawakenings, and reboots, can be successful.

  • GI No: The Rise of Nope-ra

    A bout with an entirely new illness (to add to my five-week-long tussle with sinusitis) has left me with little desire to do anything productive with my time (to be fair, this illness is partly defined by severe lethargy). Thus I’ve taken time to catch up with a few movies and TV this weekend (including a sizeable chunk of Season 5 of Castle).

    I could wax lyrical about the moral cesspool of How To Sell A Banksy. I could reminisce about the very first time I saw GoldenEye (aged about 8: a very eye-opening experience). I could even deconstruct everything that’s a little off about Marcus du Sautoy’s pseudo-mathematic miniseries The Code. Instead, a brief disquisition on the other high art piece I was fortunate enough to catch up on this weekend: GI Joe: The Rise of Cobra. (more…)

  • Spared no expense on everything but story

    This is not the most unbelievable thing about Jurassic World. At least mosasaurs actually existed.
    This is not the most unbelievable thing about Jurassic World. At least mosasaurs actually existed.

    There are lots of things you can do with collaborators. Build a house, manage some kind of project that synergises all the paradigms, play sports. There are even things you can do with collaborators in film production: set up lights, operate cameras, run cables, produce. I am of the very strong opinion, though, that there is one thing you can’t do as a team: write a script. And if you need an absolute case-in-point as to why this is now indisputable fact: go watch Jurassic World.

    I had very low expectations of this film going in, but there was still a part of me that really wanted to get swept up and then blown away. I wanted to rekindle some of that magic from that moment in Jurassic Park where Alan Grant turns Ellie Satler’s head so she can gawp at the brachiosaurs. The thing with Jurassic Park, though, is that they were restrained by technology. Time and time again, this restriction has led to some of the most innovative — and believeable — filmmaking. The combination of early CGI with models, miniatures, and animatronics, had the audience holding their breath with every T-Rex footstep. The other Spielbergian touch that really worked in the original is the idea of hiding the monster. This is something he started with Jaws (for budgetary reasons), but which ended up being so very effective. If you hide the monster, you can build the script and the characters around that suspense, such that when you do reveal the demon in full, it becomes a focal point: the final conflict, which ultimately leads to resolution.

    This sense of wonder mingled with deft suspense, this ability to suspend disbelief, this logical story progression, was entirely absent from Jurassic World. Instead we get Male (Chris Pratt) off-handedly flirting with Female (Bryce Dallas Howard) while the genetically-modified hybrid dinosaur runs amok in an inexplicably fully-functioning dinosaur theme park. If the story were that simple, the film may have worked (or had a fighting chance). Instead, you’ve also got Kid 1 and Kid 2 embroiled in the chaos, military contractors led by Gomer Pyle (Vincent D’Onofrio) wanting to use dinosaurs to overthrow ISIS or whatever, oh, and Male (Pratt) has actually been training velociraptors to do tricks for park visitors. Also there’s 21st century Denis Nedry (played by New Girl guy) and his coworkers in Mission Control at NASA watching everyone die on big screens. Also this film is apparently a subtle dig at consumer culture and the film industry.

    My biggest problem with Jurassic World isn’t the sheer amount of groundless, physics-defying CGI (at one point a velociraptor glides across the ground as though animated by me with my crappy After Effects skills). My biggest problem with Jurassic World is that all these characters I’ve mentioned are supposed to be human beings. They’re meant to have backstories and lives and motivations, and all of these things are meant to be apparent to us as soon as we meet them, because we know we won’t have enough time with all of them across the length of the film. My biggest problem with Jurassic World is that it fails so spectacularly at what Jurassic Park did so well: tell a story with a sizeable ensemble cast, and get you seeing what they see, feeling what they feel, wanting what they want. And so much of that empathy is down to the script. Shoehorning expositional shortcuts into dialogue is not the way to create empathy with characters: showing us how a character we’ve prejudged based on appearance reacts in an extraordinary situation is. To be fair, there are moments in Jurassic World like this, but they’re so few and far between that these actual character development/storytelling ‘bits’ are lost in a sea of hokiness.

    These characters were profiled by committee, and their stories were written by different people in different rooms, and there was no meeting between that process and filming. The clunkiness of the script is even further exacerbated when your film does not have any acts: the audience is left with no time to breathe, and there is no logical escalation of action. Storytelling was farmed off here, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen it writ so clearly on the screen. Almost every line of dialogue in the first half of the film made me cringe. I think I only stopped cringing in the second half because the final build-up of action was distracting (and my shoulders were sore).

    The biggest hurdle that Jurassic World faces is that it’s part of a franchise that began with one of the most beloved films of the 1990s. It doesn’t hurt that the original film is one of the finest action-adventure films in cinematic history, with believeable characters, with pacing, and with some of the most innovative visual effects ever put on screen. Jurassic World fails for the very reasons that it attempts to satirise: it ignores its audience, giving them what it thinks they want, rather than attempting to engage them on a meaningful level.

    Suffice to say this new franchise will likely not, uh, uh, find a way.

  • I jumped a shark and I liked it

    kcjLqPg2QJWsPnKkNXct_avengers-age-of-ultron-group-banner

    I really liked this film, and it’s really hard to articulate why. I’d seen all the criticism, read all the accounts of the demise of storytelling, character development, and good taste: hell, even the blaming of this movie for the single-handed demolition of the popcorn movie.

    Somehow, though, five minutes in, I forgot all that. I didn’t find the story hard to follow. I didn’t find it particularly dumb (and certainly not intellectual). I enjoyed all the characters, including Ultron. The Romanov/Banner subplot was oddly sweet. Thor was, well, adorable. Hulk was hulkey. And yep, it still hit all the touchstones (pardon the pun) for the next few movies and, yep, I’ll probably go see them too.

    Of course it’s not believable. Of course it’s not pristine storytelling. It’s got lots of stupid action in it for no real reason. There’s no time for real character development.

    Reason? It’s a comic book movie. Go in with sub-zero expectations, like I did, and you’ll have a ball.

    P.S. Fun fact: beyond this blog post, I have no desire whatsoever to write about Age of Ultron, certainly not from any academic perspective. Heh, maybe that’s why I liked it.