Just curious, but would people complain about this series if it was called "cinema tropes" instead?
Kind of? Because it's still not very useful as a medium of critique or commentary. Playing a game of "here's a thing" 100 times over the course of a video isn't much of anything. "Here's a monster in shadows". "Here's a climactic scene that calls back to an establishing shot earlier in the movie". "Here's a moment where we use diegetic material in a contrived way to help make sure the audience is able to understand the rules of the universe." Well, I guess the last one would actually be a bit more useful than what they actually do even if I think it's still a bit too nuts-n-bolts analytical in comparison to actually thinking about big-picture storytelling purpose (i.e., what purpose the story itself is serving, not just what this moment serves for the story).
Like, even though I disagree with it I can understand the thought process of someone who looks at a horror movie, think, "oh, great, yet another fast-moving fangy monster that's mostly going to be obscured in shadows yet again why do people bother with these cliches". I'm not sure that a 30-minute youtube thing that starts out with "shot barely gives us a chance to see what the hell the creature is, what's the point of this shot" is useful criticism because it's enabling a sort of filmic illiteracy that wants to ask questions about why content is the way it is without considering theme, motivation, metaphor, etc. CinemaSins is particularly notable because they use this in a dismissive way that feels anti-art and anti-intellectual but they're hardly the only ones on youtube that want to engage with movies in only the most basic, surface-level means imaginable.
I like Dan "the foldable guy" Olson's video here on popular "analysis" of Annihilation and how it misses the forest for the trees:
