10 Movies Utterly Ruined By Their Final Revelations

10. The Village

There was a point in cinema history when M Night Shyamalan looked like he might emerge as "King of the Twists", addling the brains of countless movie-goers with one twist after another before hitting them with a final game-changing revelation. As we all know by now, the early promise demonstrated in his debut The Sixth Sense was an empty one, and instead we've been treated to a law of diminishing returns culminating in such movie atrocities as The Last Airbender and After Earth. Shyamalan's 2004 film The Village certainly doesn't fall into the ignominious category of his more recent films - indeed, its initial premise, in which the inhabitants of a small 19th century-style village find themselves unable to escape on account of deadly creatures which inhabit the surrounding woodland, seemed like a solid set-up. Unfortunately, the revelation that they are actually living in the present day and the creatures don't exist but rather are part of a conspiracy to keep the residents in fear of the outside world turned out to be one of the most misjudged twists in recent history. Roger Ebert succinctly described it as "one step up the ladder of narrative originality from It was all a dream." If only the same could be said for the ending of the film.