re: Watched Jacob's Ladder for the first time. Opinions on it?

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It also gets and added bonus, IMHO, that the way it is done makes it reachable knowing the reveal and seeing how it was playing fair, similar to Sixth Sense, with it.

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Interesting you mentioned The Sixth Sense, because I was going to reference that after reading Coco's post. I saw it when it came out (I was 9 or 10 and didn't really understand it, but really dug the creepy tone). I re-watched it 10 years or so later in college and liked it even more due to all the religious symbolism and some of the philosophical themes on life, death, regret, redemption, etc...

But I do think it probably loses a bit of its impact if you're seeing it for the 1st time in a post Sixth Sense world. I'm sure there were films where the protagonist doesn't know he's dead before the Sixth Sense, but I think that's a clear line in film due to its cultural impact and influence. It became such a part of the zeitgeist that it's affected how we watch movies. And tv shows. I think Lost was probably influenced by the Sixth Sense as was the way we consumed it.

After The Sixth Sense, everything was on the table, and we started looking for ways creators could subvert our expectations. And they had to anticipate that and add an extra twist or some more red herrings. (And you could probably throw Fight Club in here, even though Tyler Durden was a split personality and the protagonist (did Ed Norton's character have a name or was he just "The Narrator?") wasn't technically dead. And new movies and tv shows suffered from that, but so did older ones like Jacob's Ladder. I still really like it, but there's a nostalgia factor to it that's probably not there for somebody who saw it in a post-Sixth Sense world.

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It wasn’t a total arse pull like some other reveals such as No Way Out.

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This is the trick to making good films with huge twists/reveals. You have to earn it. You can have some red herrings and misdirects, but you can't cheat. And that's really hard to pull off without giving it away and keeping the story interesting and the drama intense.