There are over 2000 IMDb reviews for "The Sixth Sense" so I don't think I can add anything that hasn't already been said. But in case someone has already spoiled the ending for you (like some dumbbutt did for me and the entire office back in 1999, causing me to avoid this movie for 15 years), never fear... it's still VERY MUCH worth watching.
The cool twist is, of course, the main punch of this film. But it's the kind of film you have to watch twice. Once for the story and once for the poetry. So to all my fellow film lovers who happen to have friends & coworkers with big mouths, this film is still a real treat on a poetic & artistic level.
M. Night Shyamalan is one of the few directors who deserves the hype and popularity he gets, at least for this film (I haven't seen any of his others but soon will). Everything is meticulously planned, every camera movement, every shadow, every color and every editing cut, almost to the point of obsessive mania. In the DVD extras he and his crew explain why they did everything the way they did; for example they do a lot of long takes because their philosophy was that rapid cuts tend to disrupt the viewer's thought process. So instead of showing a dialogue between two people in a volley of closeup cuts, the scene is done with 1 camera filming them from the side, slowly, almost hypnotically moving between both of them as it gets closer over the course of perhaps 2 minutes.
I could go on for ages about such scenes, but you probably get the point. If you enjoy the classic directors known for their careful & deliberate approach to filmmaking, directors like Orson Welles ("Citizen Kane"), Otto Preminger ("The Man with the Golden Arm"), Kurosawa ("Seven Samurai") or even the younger crop of great directors like Steven Soderbergh ("Traffic") and Alfonso Cuarón ("Children of Men"), you definitely have to check out this movie and other works of Shyamalan.
The cool twist is, of course, the main punch of this film. But it's the kind of film you have to watch twice. Once for the story and once for the poetry. So to all my fellow film lovers who happen to have friends & coworkers with big mouths, this film is still a real treat on a poetic & artistic level.
M. Night Shyamalan is one of the few directors who deserves the hype and popularity he gets, at least for this film (I haven't seen any of his others but soon will). Everything is meticulously planned, every camera movement, every shadow, every color and every editing cut, almost to the point of obsessive mania. In the DVD extras he and his crew explain why they did everything the way they did; for example they do a lot of long takes because their philosophy was that rapid cuts tend to disrupt the viewer's thought process. So instead of showing a dialogue between two people in a volley of closeup cuts, the scene is done with 1 camera filming them from the side, slowly, almost hypnotically moving between both of them as it gets closer over the course of perhaps 2 minutes.
I could go on for ages about such scenes, but you probably get the point. If you enjoy the classic directors known for their careful & deliberate approach to filmmaking, directors like Orson Welles ("Citizen Kane"), Otto Preminger ("The Man with the Golden Arm"), Kurosawa ("Seven Samurai") or even the younger crop of great directors like Steven Soderbergh ("Traffic") and Alfonso Cuarón ("Children of Men"), you definitely have to check out this movie and other works of Shyamalan.