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re:View is a internet film review series launched in 2016. It is one of the many series produced by RedLetterMedia, best known for their Mr. Plinkett reviews, Half in the Bag and Best of the Worst.

While those series are known for them reviewing films that are current releases or some of the worst of all time, re:View gives the RLM gang a chance to look back at films from the past that they want to talk about. It is more stripped down compared to their other shows, with two hosts just having a conversation against simple red curtains, largely devoid of gimmicks or storylines.

In the past, the re:View brand included both movies the hosts were intimately familiar with and films they had seen once in the distant past and decided to reappraise. In May 2023, the latter were spun-off under the re:Visit label, but otherwise the format is identical.

The hosts rotate every episode, with Mike Stoklasa, Jay Bauman, Rich Evans, Jack Packard and Josh "The Wizard" Davis appearing most often. Occasionally, they’re joined by a guest, like Canadian visual effects artists Jim and Colin, screenwriter Simon Barrett, former child star Macaulay Culkin, or Giftedly Bad filmmaker Len Kabasinski.

    Films and series reviewed on re:View/re:Visit include, in order of airing: 

Tropes associated with re:View include:

  • Artifact Title: The show originally focused solely on discussing older movies that the gang thought deserved a fresh look. This is referenced by the formatting of the show's title, "re:View," to emphasize the two possible meanings of "review": to analyze something or to view it again. The show's format has since been expanded to include anything the gang decides to discuss in depth, although later they would spin some of those off into the re:Visit label.
  • Artistic License – Space:
    • In their Short Treks review, Mike and Rich mock the writers for not knowing that a shooting star only happens when a meteor burns up in the atmosphere. They then highlight their own amateur status by debating whether the correct term is "meteor", "meteorite", or "meteoroid".note  Rich says they should film it multiple times for coverage, but Mike is so confident he refuses and declares, "I'm rolling the dice on this one!"note .
    • Mike and Rich think the showrunners of CBS' Star Trek are so dumb that the Star Trek: Picard series will have Picard leading an away team on the Sun, wearing Sun-proof suits.
  • Awesome, but Impractical: Humorously discussed in their review of Independence Day, where Mike points out that if the aliens' goal really is to extract Earth's resources, then destroying our major cities with a gigantic (and highly vulnerable) death laser is completely unnecessary. He goes on to propose that since the technological advantage is so ridiculously skewed in the aliens' favor, all they would have to do to get what they want is to park their ships in low-Earth orbit or sub-atmosphere, drop their resource-extraction-equipment down to the surface and suck up the oceans like a straw, and humanity would have absolutely no way of fighting them. Boom, the aliens win. No interspecies warfare required.
    Mike: And even though they have their shields up and are impervious to the fighters, the aliens send out their own little fighters, so that it could be like Star Wars.
    Jay: But there's a reason logically in the movie that they do that, right?
    Mike: No. It's so that the movie could be closer to Star Wars.
  • Bait-and-Switch: A hallmark of almost all RLM shows.
  • Deliberately Monochrome: For films like Eraserhead and Ed Wood, the episode is shot in black and white.
  • Devil's Advocate: Rich and Mike take turns being one for Picard season one and two, even though both still despised those seasons.
  • "Do It Yourself" Theme Tune: For the "Robocop 2" review, Mike blurts out the show's theme tune by himself.
  • EmPHAsis On The Wrong SylLAble: Mike and Jay repeatedly pronounce "Mars Attacks!" as one word, like they're talking about "marzipan".
  • Fat and Skinny: Mike and Jay, Rich and Jack, Josh and Jim/Colin, the list goes on.
  • Follow the Leader: Mike and Jay relentlessly mock Independence Day for how much every dogfight scene - especially the climax - rips off Star Wars (the Aerial Canyon Chase, the dogfights, the climax revolving around the bad guys parking their giant green space laser above the heroes' secret base, etc., etc.) invoked
  • Grammar Nazi: Mike is so annoyed that Picard says his mother "hung herself" rather than "hanged herself" that he mentions it in two different episodes and even overlays the differences in definitions onscreen (though the graphic ironically contains a typo).
  • Hidden Depths: Lampshaded by Jay when they discuss Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory, noting that several of their viewers are very likely to be surprised to learn that the film is a favorite of the infamously cynical and deadpan Mike.
  • Hipster: Jay and Josh warn before their re:View episode about Eraserhead that if they're the hosts, be ready to shut the video off because they're going to enthuse about cult arthouse films. (Their next films are The Gate, True Stories and Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me).
  • Insistent Terminology: In the Cabin Fever episode, actor Rider Strong is never referred to by his real name, nor by the name of his character (Paul), but as "Boy Meets World". No, not the name of his character from Boy Meets World (Shawn), they literally just keep calling him "Boy Meets World". What's even funnier is that his character in the show was not even the boy meeting the world in question.
  • Kids Shouldn't Watch Horror Films: In the The Return of the Living Dead episode, both Jay and guest Freddie Williams reveal that they both saw the movie when they were far too young, with Freddie saying that it scared him
  • Mood Dissonance: Invoked in the Independence Day episode, when the editing highlights an example of this in the movie, where Will Smith and Harry Connick Jr.'s hotshot Air Force pilots cracking dumb jokes and laughing is intercut with scenes from earlier in the movie of entire cities being destroyed by waves of fire and hundreds of thousands of people presumably being killed.
  • Mood Whiplash: Mike being genuinely teary-eyed while talking about the passing of Harold Ramis is soon contrasted when, while comparing how there can never be a true Ghostbusters reunion with how there couldn't be a full The Beatles reunion after the death of John Lennon, Lennon is represented in a picture as Ringo Starr.
  • Painting the Medium: The Eraserhead review has an almost inaudible extremely low-pitched low-frequency hum as part of the background soundtrack, as a very subtle reference to how such noises comprise most of the soundtrack of the movie.
  • Seinfeldian Conversation: The reviewers, particularly Mike and Jay, tend to get lost on long elaborate tangents that have absolutely nothing to do with the films they're allegedly reviewing. In their review of Enemy Mine, Mike spends nearly the first full five minutes of the video riffing on a bad "Enemy Mime" pun about a mime serial killer.
  • The One Thing I Don't Hate About You: While discussing season 2 of Star Trek: Picard, Rich is genuinely surprised at how the biggest part of the season he actually likes is the show's version of The Borg Queen, a character that he previously thought was fine on her own, but a terrible concept that went against the whole point of The Borg, and while he still believes that, with the show in general being such a miserable experience, he finds her dialogue and performance at least fun to watch, hammy though they may be. Both Mike and Rich wish the whole season had just been about The Borg Queen trying to make her way around 2024 Los Angeles instead of having all these various side-plots happening at once.
  • Passed-Over Promotion: In The Mist episode, they note how one of the actors, Sam Witwer, is also the voice of Emperor Palpatine on Star Wars Rebels. Mike and Jay wonder if there’s anyone else who could have done a better job. Mike notes that no one comes to mind.
  • Pop Culture Osmosis: Name-dropped by Mike while discussing season 2 of Star Trek: Picard as the reason why the show keeps regurgitating the most famous plot points of TNG such as the immense focus on Data during season 1, bringing back the Borg once again, and featuring the return of side-characters like Q and Guinan, as these are the elements that wider audiences are most likely to be familiar with. However, the show's usage of Small Reference Pools is bizarrely averted one time much to Mike and Rich's bafflement when Picard randomly gives a Shout-Out to Gary Seven, an obsure one-off character from Star Trek: The Original Series.
  • Product Placement: The re:View for Demolition Man opens with Jack and Rich munching on Taco Bell in reference to the restaurant's very prominent appearance in the movie. Jay comes in at one point to silently swipe a taco and then walk back off camera.
  • Random Events Plot: Mike and Rich note that Discovery is basically this due the fact every episode introduces a Plot Point then abandons it in the next episode.
  • Retroactive Recognition: invoked Discussed by Mike and Rich when talking about Marc Alaimo's bit role in Total Recall (1990), before he became a regular on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.
  • Romanticism Versus Enlightenment: Discussed by by Mike and Rich in relation to one main of the problems they, as old school Star Trek fans, have with the writing Star Trek: Picard, and, by extension, much of the Discovery Era of the show. Classic Star Trek, especially The Next Generation Era, learned heavily towards Enlightenment in its writing style, especially in its dialogue, where characters would by and large stick to scientific and clinical terms and detached and objective descriptions of events, which both Mike and Rich note was pretty appropriate for and tonal consistent with a Sci-Fi show, written primarily by experienced Science Fiction writers. In contrast, they think of Picard as leaning much more towards Romanticism, something they theorize as being rooted in its writers being overall more accustomed to writing for drama series, and as a result the dialogue style is more emotional, often bordering on the flowery and theatrical, something they feel notably clashes against the older incarnations of the Trek franchise, or, more glaringly, conflict with the established personalities of various characters.
  • Schmuck Bait: Rich complains that he fell for it when Mike told him that Discovery season 2 was improving — and then it got dumber.
  • Splash of Color: The Twin Peaks review is black and white, with the only color being Jay's green blazer in imitation of Dougie Jones.
  • Straw Feminist: Rich and Mike mock the female characters in Star Trek: Picard who are a male idea of what a strong female should be: cold, vengeful Female Misogynists. In particular, they noted that Seven of Nine went from being a cool and collected scientist to some snarky assassin.
  • Stylistic Suck: Mike makes his case in Freddy Got Fingered episode that almost all the film's flaws are intentional — Tom Green just set out to make the most painfully unfunny Hollywood movie possible by mixing grotesque violence and pointlessly disgusting vulgarity with intentionally hackneyed Hollywood sentimentality. It just so happens that he did too good a job and audiences and critics both took it at face value. (This is actually a common critique of the film - that Green was making a dada-esque Deconstructive Parody of the gross-out comedies popular at the time. Even Roger Ebert, in his original brutally scathing review, noted that the day may come when the film is seen as a milestone of neo-surrealism.)
  • Take That!: In the Dune episode, Jay allows Colin to watch Dune (2021) on his cell phone. This is a playful dig at David Lynch, who famously stated that if you watched one of his movies "on your fucking telephone," then you haven't actually watched it.
  • Top Ten List: Mike and Rich did a video where they picked their favorite top five Star Trek: The Next Generation episodes. Later they expanded to list with five more favorite episodes to make it a top ten list. In a similar fashion Jay and Rich ranked all of John Carpenter's movies
  • Video Review Show: When it launched it was RLM's simplest to date: just two guys, talking about movies, with clips in between. It has since been superceded in simplicity by Red Letter Media Talk About... which dispenses with the decor entirely and is filmed on couches in their back room.

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