Review of The Sixth Sense (1999) by Brandon W — 05 Jun 2015

I feel a bit bad for M. Night Shyamalan as he now keeps directing and writing films that are hilariously bad, and with that upcoming movie The Visit, he seems like he's now making small movies. We will never act like we don't know how the director got famous, although we wonder about how's he still making films that are failure after failure, as he has a fantastic start with The Sixth Sense.

People praise Brice Willis and Haley Joel Osment which make sense and Haley Joel Osment is one of the highlights of the film. The thing is however, I think Toni Colette should get some of the recognitions as she is also just as great as Willis and Osment and also can act as an emotional person very well.

The writing is great and there's never a line that seem to be unintentionally funny like Shyamalan's recent movies. It does have some funny moments though, and a lot of creepy moments. The movie has a good balance of creating a ghost story with tricks from old horror films, while putting in new horror tricks that wouldn't make the film feel dated.

It does have some bit of jumpscares, but it's mostly out of imagery which is very effective and gave me a bit of a jolt out of it. I know that people are questioning Osment's character about how he got the ability to see, hear, or talk to spirits, but my question is, why do certain people even have that gift at all? I know this is a cliche thing for me to say, but from my thoughts, there are some things that can't be explained at all, and we just have to accept it from what the special type of people can do.

For the twist ending that everybody has gone on about this film, I knew how it ended after I watched the whole movie, but when it got to it, the twist is very effective, and would come up as a gigantic surprise to people who had never heard of the ending of have never seen this film.

James Newton Howard did a great job with the soundtrack, and the direction by M. Night Shyamalan is really good. The Sixth Sense is a thriller masterpiece that has created a line, "I see dead people," that has been said to this present day.