Ethos: Other Factors

One other thing that you may want to look out for when examining ethical appeals in film is audience satisfaction with the ending. This is not a major issue with Hardball or The Bad News Bears, as the audience should find both of these films' endings acceptable. The main place you find issues with this is in films that rely on twist endings. Great examples of this can be found in the films of M. Night Shyamalan; the twist ending has become a staple of his films. It worked well in The Sixth Sense and is in fact the main reason for that film's success. The final twist was a surprise to most people, but it didn't make people angry because it was something that you could have figured out through watching the film -- Shyamalan was very careful to make sure that everything in the movie fit with this ultimate revelation. Most people did not see it coming, but felt that they could have. In other words, they didn't feel like they'd been tricked, only surprised.

Shyamalan's work since then with the twist ending seems to have been received by audiences in an increasingly negative way, with his most recent film The Village getting the most criticism. People criticized the twist ending of this film because, in the words of my brother, "It just came out of left field." (Note: I thought the ending and Shyamalan's choices about it made perfect sense, especially in light of the mindset he knows people enter his movies with nowadays. If you care, and don't mind my spoiling the ending for you if you haven't seen it, read what I think about it here.) The issue with The Village is that Shyamalan lost the trust of his audience by throwing an ending at them that they didn't feel was fairly established and led up to by the rest of the movie. You do things like this, and people are not happy with your movie.