The Shawshank Redemption/YMMV

"Andy: The funny thing is, on the outside, I was an honest man, straight as an arrow. I Had to Come to Prison to Be a Crook."
 * Adaptation Displacement
 * Award Snub: Probably the Most Egregious Example. It won absolutely nothing.
 * Bittersweet Ending:
 * On the other hand,
 * Black and Grey Morality: Nobody's perfectly morally upstanding in these movies. The closest you get to good guys are Andy, Red, and Brooks, and even they do some morally questionable things. Then you have how unbelievably cruel and remorseless the actual villains are...


 * Red and Brooks, as lovely as they are, did something to warrant their life sentences in prison. Red, we know, committed murder, and it's quite likely Brooks did, too. Andy, while he didn't actually kill anyone, did seem to consider it, seeing as he stalked his wife with a loaded gun while drunk.
 * Complete Monster:
 * Also The Sisters.
 * Crowning Moment of Awesome: In the finale,


 * Crowning Moment of Heartwarming: Red walking up the beach at the end.
 * Crowning Music of Awesome: The score is written by Thomas Newman. Beautiful music is a given.
 * Specifically, the opera Andy plays to the entire prison while inside the warden's office.
 * Which was written by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and not Thomas Newman. Just making that clear.
 * Ear Worm: The music that plays when.
 * Family-Unfriendly Aesop: The storyline implies that it is justifiable to . It also implies that it is justifiable to . In other words, this movie implies that ends justify means. Yes, it has family-friendly aesops as well (the themes of hope and perseverance come to mind), but the moral perspective implied from some aspects of the movie (especially the ) is quite at odds with more conventional forms of morality.
 * Well, Andy says it himself - he Had to Come to Prison to Be a Crook. As well, it wasn't as if the money laundering and whatnot was Andy's idea... the warden essentially forced him to, Andy had no agency to resist him.
 * Also, there is a school of thought that says that if you are wrongfully imprisoned, it is not only permissible but morally imperative that you do your best to escape rather than meekly accept the wrongdoing of the system. So this is definitely a case of mileage varying, as Andy's escape could be seen as an excellent lesson about not simply laying back and accepting a miscarriage of justice done to you simply because the State said so.
 * Fandom Rivalry: In 2008, a somewhat complicated series of votes on the Internet Movie Database to give The Dark Knight the spot on the Top 250 as the #1 film of all time (that was from The Godfather) ultimately led to Shawshank topping the list. The Godfather had held that position for quite a long stretch of time, and its fans were, to put it mildly, not impressed; even now, over a year later, a visit to Shawshank's IMDB forums reveals thread after thread attacking it as unworthy of being #1 (and, implicitly or explicitly, favouring The Godfather).
 * This makes the movie inevitably Hilarious in Hindsight when you think about the Robot Chicken sketch where... well, you know.
 * Faux Symbolism
 * Hilarious in Hindsight: When Andy is describing his fantasies of Zihuatenejo, Red tells him to ignore them, describing them as "shitty pipe dreams."
 * It Was His Sled:
 * Memetic Mutation: The scene where Andy plays opera music for the prison has been edited many times on YouTube. Said opera music has been replaced by various kinds of music, from pop music to heavy metal, and even by flea market ads. To be fair, the reactions of the prisoners and the warden made it pretty ripe for parody.
 * Moral Event Horizon:
 * Also, Hadley crosses this when he beats an emotionally-overwhelmed prisoner to death.
 * Rewatch Bonus: The surprise inspection scene. The tension.
 * Some Anvils Need to Be Dropped: Hope is a good thing.
 * Tear Jerker: " was here." Buckets.
 * And there's
 * Vindicated by Cable: And how. Ted Turner loved this movie so much, he made sure it was playing on at least one of his cable networks every weekend for about a decade, thus rescuing it from obscurity. You can still find it on TBS or a similar channel, even 15 years later.
 * The Woobie: Andy Dufresne himself, of course, given what he goes through, and
 * Don't forget Tommy. Poor kid works his ass off to make something of himself and is more than eager to help Andy.
 * Brooks however takes the cake: he's an absolutely sweet old man who has spent most of his life in prison, and has become so adjusted to it that he desperately tries to attack an inmate so he won't be forced to go on parole. When he goes back outside, everything's changed drastically since he was incarcerated, and that combined with his arthritis taking its toll on him, his employers at his new job being unsympathetic assholes, and his sleep being plagued with nightmares drive him to due to it all being too much for him to handle.
 * Xanatos Roulette: An embarrassingly large passage in the novella just consists of Red enumerating all of the things that might have gone wrong with Andy's plan, but somehow did not. The movie, to its credit, at least tries to explain some of these problems (such as where Andy hid the rock hammer, or how he secured a change of clothes).
 * Xanatos Roulette: An embarrassingly large passage in the novella just consists of Red enumerating all of the things that might have gone wrong with Andy's plan, but somehow did not. The movie, to its credit, at least tries to explain some of these problems (such as where Andy hid the rock hammer, or how he secured a change of clothes).