The Sixth Sense was good and the plot twist was interesting to say the least–but I have no desire to go back and rewatch it.

Shyamalan’s movies tend to be all about the twist at the end–otherwise, they’re dull, boring movies. The twist in Fight Club was a great avenue for the plot to take off into, but was it necessary for the plot? Probably not completely. The movie stands on it’s own two feet regardless.

I LOVED Memento and can watch it over and over and over again–perhaps simply because of the way the plot is revealed. It’s one of my favorite movies.

hollywood movies stick to a very rigid formula, and plot twists are almost like little cheats that attempt to subvert that formula. they deliberately withhold a key piece of information that, had you known about them the moment they happened, would change your feeling about the story and, in most cases, show their weaknesses.

for example, using “the sixth sense,” if you knew the twist the moment it happened, in the first act of the film, you would be watching the film to see how the character’s grow and evolve beyond that moment. the twist at the end does, indeed, force us to go back and rethink (or re-view) whether what happened was consistent, but the problem is that if the twist has been withheld from us and the characters, what else was left out as a matter of convenience? the filmmakers become unreliable narrators which undermines the veracity of the rest of the film but because they give us no clue that they are being unreliable we are forced to accept what we are told only to find out later we’ve been duped.

when you go to see a magician you expect to be fooled. if, through slight of hand, they manage to take your watch and wallet, you accept that they pulled one on you. when a film steals your watch and wallet (your time and money) in the guise of telling a story but withholding information you feel cheated. at least i do.

imagine an agatha christie detective story. all of her little mysteries are built on the idea of the red herring, the false leads that make you think one thing when, in fact, you can’t possibly know what is happening until the last chapter when the detective explains whodunnit with information the reader/viewer was never given.

now, it would be rude of me to not suggest twisters that i think did work because they didn’t attempt to hide the information as a way of manipulating audience expectations. the first would be “memento” where the story is all there, it’s just told backwards, which makes the story twist every ten minutes or so. many people didn’t like or appreciate the film because it required you to work it through as you watched, but the reward of the twist at the end is that you’ve earned the right to know and the reveal is satisfying.

the other one i like is “the conversation” which hinges on a misinterpretation of a single line of dialog. both the main character and the audience are following the wrong trail, and would expect or behave differently if they hadn’t made the same mistake together. when the twist comes at the end you don’t wonder if it fits or makes sense, you suddenly realize that all the previous assumptions were a house of cards built on a bad foundation. that last twist makes you go “uh oh” as you realize things are worse than you imagined, and the film ends with everyone knowing that it’s too late to change both what happened and what’s next.

anyway, that’s my take.