I'm glad to see The Sixth Sense blowing away the competition on that last question because M. Night Shamalamadingdong is such an appalling storyteller that it does actually ruin his stories to know the "twist" ending. They're just little puzzles to solve, and once you know the answer they're impossible to sit through again.
I'd twigged that he was dead a few minutes into the film (it reminded me a lot of an old one called Jacob's Ladder, which helped), and it was honestly so obvious to me that Bruce Willis was dead that I was expecting the plot to build on that. I thought that was the jumping-off point, not the big reveal at the end. So I found it watchable the first time only because I was expecting more.
I came out of the theater as surprised as anyone else, but for an entirely different reason: I was dismayed, I felt cheated.
Psycho, Citizen Kane, all that...those I can watch endlessly because the execution of the story is so good that it's enjoyable even if you know or guess the "spoiler." Knowing stuff like that never actually spoils anything for me; like you, I'm there for the ride.
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I'd twigged that he was dead a few minutes into the film (it reminded me a lot of an old one called Jacob's Ladder, which helped), and it was honestly so obvious to me that Bruce Willis was dead that I was expecting the plot to build on that. I thought that was the jumping-off point, not the big reveal at the end. So I found it watchable the first time only because I was expecting more.
I came out of the theater as surprised as anyone else, but for an entirely different reason: I was dismayed, I felt cheated.
Psycho, Citizen Kane, all that...those I can watch endlessly because the execution of the story is so good that it's enjoyable even if you know or guess the "spoiler." Knowing stuff like that never actually spoils anything for me; like you, I'm there for the ride.