Lindsay Ellis is just about ready to start shooting a video in her personal studio—aka a tiny second-floor room in Ellis’ western Los Angeles home—and the 34-year-old writer and YouTube essayist is making some final preparations. She gently repositions a couple of pet tortoises resting in a tank nearby, so they won’t noisily thunk their heads against the wall mid-shoot. Then she heads to a shelf stocked with Transformers of varying sizes, colors, and allegiances.

“Which Starscream should I use?” she asks, scanning her collection. She eventually selects a handful of figures, including miniature-sized versions of Starscream and Windblade that recently appeared on her wedding cake, and carries them back to her desk.

If you’ve seen any of Ellis’ videos on YouTube, where she has more than half a million subscribers, you’re no doubt aware of her love for all things robots-in-disguise-related. A Transformer sometimes appears in the background as she narrates one of her thoughtful, deeply researched film-criticism essays, which have included such entries as “The Ideology of the First Order” and “The Death of the Hollywood Movie Musical."

And for the past two years, she’s been slowly rolling out The Whole Plate, a series that deconstructs the ear-drum-splitting mayhem of the Transformers franchise through various academic lenses: Feminism. Marxism. Auteur theory. (There’s even an entry titled “Queering Michael Bay.") Together, Ellis’ Whole Plate videos have earned nearly 4 million views on YouTube—a remarkable tally, considering that some of the platform’s most popular film-criticism genres appear to be “Dudes Still Yelling ’Bout Porgs” or “I Just Noticed Wes Anderson’s Fonts, and I Have Some Thoughts (Part 1 of 18).”

Ellis’ deftly edited essays are in a genre all their own. She rarely focuses on the big-name new releases of the moment. And she doesn’t care much for what she calls “thing-bad” videos, in which someone piles on the bile toward a beloved film. Instead, she approaches movies, even the ones she doesn’t especially love, with a combination of scholarly rigor, film-history acumen, and reliable wryness.

Watching her clips is like taking a Screen Aesthetics 101 class with a cool professor, and then hanging out at the campus coffee shop afterward, listening in as she riffs about, say, the significance of a giant robot peeing on John Turturro. Or the complicated blandness of Disney’s Pocahontas. Or the stilted rebelliousness of 2005’s Rent adaptation. “The things I think most about,” Ellis says, “are things that are deeply flawed but have this really interesting potential.”

The video Ellis is finishing up on this winter morning finds her digging into both the 2005 remake of War of the Worlds and 1996’s alien-invasion smash Independence Day (a movie Ellis describes as “dumb as a bag of rocks” yet nonetheless loves). Her home-studio setup consists of a single digital camera, some minimal lighting and sound equipment, and a boxy, iPhone-controlled teleprompter.

Once they’re ready to go, Ellis puts on her glasses, bats her shoulder-length black hair away from her eyes, and digs into the movies’ greater cultural contexts. The finished product, which will easily earn a half-million views, is likely the only YouTube clip to ever jam together discussion of “textual metaphors” with footage from Mac and Me.