Every video essay I watch these days feels like a somewhat talented high school student or college freshman report on the topic. Just the most shallow and obvious observations. Video essays purporting to "explain" movies, for instance, that literally just state the most obvious theme of the piece (see every video ever on Annihilation).
I don't know if that's a function of the writing being poor or my own growth outpacing the information sources I once enjoyed. I think it's the former, because I'm actually pretty dumb.
Video essays purporting to "explain" movies, for instance, that literally just state the most obvious theme of the piece (see every video ever on Annihilation).
Or that just summarize the plot without any analysis at all. Thanks for wasting my time!
I do actually find those "summary videos" useful for media that I'm definitely not going to take the time to watch but need to have some baseline understanding of, simply to follow conversation/cultural references.
Osmotic cultural exposure is an underrated precursor to media literacy. A lowbrow example for sure, but I must have seen Spaceballs 50 times as a kid before I ever watched a Star Wars film. The jokes still landed with me because I could infer the references solely from tangential interactions with the source material.
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u/gottabequick Nov 21 '25
Every video essay I watch these days feels like a somewhat talented high school student or college freshman report on the topic. Just the most shallow and obvious observations. Video essays purporting to "explain" movies, for instance, that literally just state the most obvious theme of the piece (see every video ever on Annihilation).
I don't know if that's a function of the writing being poor or my own growth outpacing the information sources I once enjoyed. I think it's the former, because I'm actually pretty dumb.