I’m a number 4 – I’m usually pretty good at figuring out ‘twists’ and I spotted this one about a third of the way through the movie, but I don’t remember which scene tipped me off.
I was watching with my family and I got up quietly, went into the kitchen and wrote “Bruce Willis is a ghost” on a slip of paper and sealed it into an envelope. Came back and set the envelope on the coffee table and watched the rest of the movie. My husband and both kids were very surprised by the ending, which none of them had seen coming, and even more surprised when I handed them the envelope and told them to open it up.
I’m a #1. I knew absolutely nothing about it except that a lot of people liked it. I’m glad for it.
Amusing anecdote: I was home all day one day, and decided to order it on PPV. In those days, when you ordered something, you’d get to watch it again and again all day until midnight. You didn’t have to do anything, it would just play in an endless loop. (That really threw me for a curve with American Beauty, as I have no idea when the film actually starts.)
So anyway, after watching it, I went about my business. Posting to the Dope, doing the dishes, whatever. I had a growing sense of unease. It was a normal day, but something just felt – off. Spooky. Like danger was lurking in the air.
After maybe 4 hours of this, I figured it out. I had left the TV on in the other room, and the sound track to TSS was worming its way into my brain. I wasn’t even conscious of it.
Try watching it again but focus on the soundtrack. Creepy!
Surprised at how many others are admitting to be 1s. All I’ve heard since I saw the movie is how everybody saw the twist coming about 14 seconds into the movie. Myself, I don’t like it when I guess how a story will end, so I try not to think about it–I just let the story unfold. If there’s supposed to be a surprise, I want to be surprised, dammit!
As a clueless #1 I was a bit surprised by the director’s commentary on the DVD. M. Night said that, in the hospital scene where the boy says “I see dead people…they don’t know they’re dead” and says it while looking at Willis, that this would be an absolute dead give-away (hah!) of the twist. He was very surprised when test screenings showed the audience didn’t pick up on it.
I’m sort of a 4. Everyone had been saying OMG you won’t believe the ending so I went in there with this idea in the back of my head that Bruce Willis was dead. It helped me pick up on the little things, like the anniversary dinner…the wife wasn’t mad, she was sad.
Group No. 1.
It was one of those movies that I initially had no interest in seeing - it’s not that I thought it was going to be a bad movie or anything like that, it just didn’t really register for me.
But when I went back to school that fall, everybody was talking about it, and one night when I had nothing better to do, I decided to go see it. Even then I didn’t know much about it, other than it was supposed to be a supernatural thriller, so I had no idea that end was coming.
I’m a 1. I didn’t figure it out until a minute before Bruce Willis did. But then I’m notoriously bad at spotting twists, or figuring out whodunnit in a mystery.
I had heard there was a twist, but I was too absorbed by Shyamalan’s style to concentrate on figuring it out. I’ve enjoyed every one of his movies, no matter how patently ridiculous the plot.
The wife and I are in group 1. And we saw it in the nick of time, too, because just a couple or three days after we saw it, the wife accidentally overheard two colleagues blurt out the surprise while discussing it. We were honestly surprised by the ending, though.
Sure, you can say such and such behavior was odd for a living person, but I often think that and put it down to the screenplay.
But pity the poor Chinese. In a thread about weird translated movie titles a year or two ago, someone pointed out that when the movie showed in China, the title was:
I was in group 2 mainly due to an otherwise irrelevant article in EW that made an in-passing reference to the twist. What did somewhat surprise me in the movie was the revelation that Misha Barton’s character’s mother had poisoned her and her sister.
As for other twist-dependent movies I’m interested in seeing, I try to avoid spoilers but sometimes that’s almost impossible to do. For example, in the case of The Others, every discussion of its plot mentioned that the children suffered from an illness that rendered them hyper-sensitive to sunlight. When combined with several reviews that said there was a Sixth Sense-type twist at the end, it didn’t take much for me to realize without seeing the movie that the children were dead. However, I only ended up getting that half-right because I incorrectly assumed that Nicole Kidman’s character was still alive and that she was keeping the souls of her dead children from moving on to the afterlife due to her extreme loneliness and stubborn refusal to accept their deaths.
Group 1. Had taken the week off with some friends to go to Chicago. We were pretty tired after a few days, and ducked into a theater to catch a few movies. None of us watched much TV or paid attention to upcoming releases, so we went in totally sight-unseen. In fact, I think it was opening day. Totally floored all of us - absolutely amazing movie if you don’t have any expectations.
A friend of mine actually guessed it from this scene, but she was joking. I had seen it, and she hadn’t (and had no idea what the twist was). The preview came on tv, and it showed that scene. My friend jokingly said “So then Bruce Willis is dead?” Then she saw the look on my face and was like “Wait, really?”
ETA: Forgot to answer the OP. I was a 1. I didn’t know there was a twist.
I was a 1. Which is a good thing - I love “twist” movies, if they are any good. And my wife saw it in the theater and brought it home later on DVD and didn’t tell me anything except that I would like it. Same with The Crying Game, which also took me by surprise.
I thought Sixth Sense was a better example of the genre, because there wasn’t really a moment after the reveal in Crying Game where you go back and reflect on how everything fits now that you know.
I spotted the twists in The Village and Mission Impossible (the first one) about ten minutes into the film, and then basically just waited for it to be over. A good “twist” movie is great; a bad one is just awful.
My favorite “twist” movie is Angel Heart. [spoiler]“You’re gonna burn for this.”
A 4, but only because my sister totally could not stop talking about the awesome twist ending and how I was going to be so ultra-surprised-and-amazed when I found out what it was. When you’re looking for a surprise it’s much easier to find one.
Otherwise, I would have been a 1, as I almost never see twist endings coming when I’m not prepared, and I think I would have liked the movie a lot more.
Another 4, but only because I had been bombarded with “OMG!! You’ll never guess the twist at the end!!!” by every body at work. Any time I know in advance that there’s a twist (Sixth Sense/Jacob’s Ladder/Usual Suspects) it’s pretty easy to figure out. When I don’t know there’s a twist, it usually floors me (Crying Game, The Wicker Man (original, never saw the remake) - holy shit did I not see that coming, The Empire Strikes Back).