Welcome to the community, cascadebeer!
Can you please give us more details about your issues with the WD Elements external drive? I'd recommend you to check if you have access to your movies from a computer and also create a backup (copy the movies) to the computer. Once you do that, I'd suggest you go to
Disk Management and see how your external HDD is listed there. Providing some screenshots/photos would be very helpful as well.
Once you have copied your movies and have them safe and sound somewhere else, you should try testing the WD Elements with the
Data LifeGuard Diagnostics for Windows and make sure you run both the QUICK and the EXTENDED tests. The utility will help us determine the health and SMART status of the hard drive.
Keep me posted. Hope this helps you!
SuperSoph_WD