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Comment by Brajeshwar | Hacker News Reader

[Spoiler Alert]

I was at a "special invite." I remember this movie well because many of India's Bollywood whos-who were there. When the film ended, I came out and kept thinking, I wish the movie ended before the revelation, stayed on the cliffhanger, and didn't expose that the Village was "staged."

The ending made me feel like, "Duh! Was it all for nothing?"

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I remember guessing the twist almost immediately because the whole plot was a blatant rip-off of a book I had just read in school.

This is the book: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Running_Out_of_Time_(novel)

Weird thing is that Piers Anthony wrote a children’s science fiction book called “Race against time” with a similar theme.

No, I loved the ending and then thinking back through the whole movie and remember how I just assumed it was in the seventeenth century or whatever. The “it was all for nothing” in an isolated compound in the modern world made the movie for me.

Same. I absolutely loved how the reveal retroactively revised the whole story.

I liked it too. There's a bit near the start where one of the characters makes some comment with slightly awkward-sounding wording; I forget what, precisely, but it was exactly the sort of thing you'd expect from a modern English speaker fluffing an attempt to stay in character as a Victorian or whatever. They even sounded a bit like they were half-realising this as they were saying it.

I put it down to a mistake that they didn't have time to fix. But then, given the ending, I realised it must have been deliberate.

I don't know if that would have helped. I figured out the twist long before its revelation, and I think the movie would have made even less sense without some kind of explanation of the characters' strange behaviour. I came out of it thinking "I guess some names can get anything funded", since it seemed like an obviously bad story, but with more hindsight "obviously bad story" is not a problem for a film project if it makes money (just a problem for the audience), and in 2004 Shyamalan's name on a movie was guaranteed to make money, so the investors had no need to care about story.

Putting [spoilers alert] at the end is pointless

I'm so sorry to those pissed off about the spoilers. I was under the impression that for movies, it is like "about a week-ish" before hinting on spolers, and about "couple of days" for TV episodes!

Let me make it up to you. If you haven't seen it, there is a TV series based off George RR Martin's work, Game of Thrones[1].

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_of_Thrones

Edit: Huh! I can't add even a subtle hint of a joke, even on the weekends? :-(

We've moved it to the beginning now. Thanks!

Spoilers! Please

Thanks for spoiling the end.

The movie has been out for 21 years now. It's not a spoiler, you're just being reminded how much you've been passed by.

Sometimes new people are added to the world and it can take a while to catch up, though.

That is true so I hope you you never mention anything about "blowing up the death star" or you might spoil that as well.

That one's not really a spoiler. The heroes set out to do that to win, and it's obviously the type of movie where the heroes win. What's less certain is how exactly they'll get there.

> it's obviously the type of movie where the heroes win

How would I know that if I haven’t seen it

Watch enough movies and you'll know that certain things don't test well with audiences.

Is a young girl in peril? Don't worry, nothing will happen to her, the audiences won't like it.

Have we been focused on one guy for the first 20 minutes? He definitely won't die, at least until the end. And he will achieve something great regardless; it won't all be for nothing.

Did they show a gun in some scene? That's important for later; some guy called Chekhov wants it back.

Once you see the boundaries in modern storytelling, it definitely makes things rather predictable.

If you want to see a film that breaks some of the rules, watch Brimstone.

https://m.imdb.com/title/tt1895315/

Thanks! A friend recommended Gaspard Noe’s Irreversible and I will keep those lessons in mind

irreversible may give you PTSD just a friendly warning

Spoiler alert!

Apologies if this is too much of a spoiler, but you might be a bit surprised by how the film's immediate sequel plays out.

Edit: And considering when it was made and who made it, a happy ending was by no means guaranteed. Compare and contrast with the endings of Silent Running or American Graffiti.

That's partly why the [spoiler] of The Empire Strikes Back is effective, but that movie also has a different tone right from the start (even before that, with the title), and doesn't really tell a complete story but sets up the next sequel to provide resolution and the inevitable heroic victory.

Silent Running is a dystopian setting, so the ending is unsurprising, and American Graffiti is a of genre that often has bad outcomes for some characters as cautionary tales.

Really think Luke’s paternal heritage would have been a better example :)

Those people probably shouldn't click on a discussion thread about a movie they haven't seen.

The harder you try to think up rational justifications for being inconsiderate, the more you prove how there are none.

Sometimes you just want to talk about stories, though. We can't embargo them forever.

If I visit the Wikipedia page of a film I haven't seen, it's my own fault if I get spoiled. Same difference here.

After 1 Generation it's cultural bedrock, nobody yells spoilers when a king Kong climb is refererenced.

I never saw it.

You're being sarcastic but you shouldn't. The plot twist is all there is to the movie, so that reveal saved you 2 hours of your life.

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