Only spectacular if you're not a horror buff who's seen old ghost movies.

Rating: 1/10 (1 November 2008)

I'm not the biggest Shyamalan fan by any means. Of his entire body of work, only The Village and Unbreakable really stand out when originality is concerned, and they're really the only two of his movies that I've enjoyed. The major problem with The Sixth Sense is, who would have guessed, unoriginality. There is nothingminus the plot twist, I guessthat makes this stand apart from the thousands of other kid-seeing-ghosts movies that came out before it. If you've consider yourself a horror fan, and one that has seen a good selection of ghost movies, you know everything that happens here. And I mean everything.
However, there is some good. Mainly being that The Sixth Sense was one of the few groundbreaking American horror filmsand yes, it is drama/horror, not a thrillerthat brought some weight to the genre. While the majority of horror films in the '90s just focused on cheesy scares, Shyamalan focused on fine detailed, believable, high-quality scares that made the genre cinematic and not just laughable. With that said, The Sixth Sense, like most horror movies, just isn't very scary. A lot like the original Saw was a thriller set in a horror universe, The Sixth Sense is a drama set in a horror universe.
That brings out a lot of problems, however. For one, The Sixth Sense follows the same cliché formula a lot of Stephen King novels do: heavy doses of drama, with short bursts of horror scattered throughout. That just makes the already deeply unoriginal movie feel even worse because it makes it very boring. The attention to detail I mentioned above as a complement is also a major complaint.
Shyamalan's directing/writing skills are both probably both at their best here on a technical level (if you ignore the unoriginality). There wasn't a single shot in the movie that wasn't effectively done, and the plot is laid out well. The plot twist ending brought the plot twist ending into the mainstream, and it's very well done, but still a little cliché. The plot twist has been used in a lot of urban legends before, as well, if I remember right, on The Twilight Zone a few times.
So, in the end, it just left me with mixed feelings. On one hand I want to praise the movie for being so well done, but on the other hand I want to trash it for the lack of anything that sets it overall apart from every other ghost story out there. Everything was so predictable.
Let this be a lesson to all of you who say a movie can be a good movie even if it's unoriginal: you're wrong. Without originality, you're just left with no mystery, and just left feeling: "Eh, whatever. Didn't I see that before somewhere?" And that last thought is exactly my final opinion on the insanely overrated The Sixth Sense. But at least it wasn't as godawful as The Happening, right?
1/10