The Shawshank Redemption - An All-Time Classic

 (1994) ★★★★★

What've you done in the past 20 years? Finished your compulsory studies or done your time? Got promoted continuously or been the victim of office politics or socialization? Got married and had kids and divorced and remarried? Succeeded in getting along with everyone but yourself? Finally become enlightened or institutionalized? Andy (Tim Robbins) however, spends more than 20 years digging a tunnel under the wall.

I've watched this film more than 10 times, and don't mind at all watching it again coz it's so compulsive and thought-provoking like nothing I've ever seen before. It's like a spell that'd get you addicted after the first watch. All I wanna tell you is, though it's set in a prison called Shawshank, it's not a bleak, dark movie made to disgust you. Instead, it's gonna make you cry with happy tears, coz you'd be convinced: 'hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things, and no good thing ever dies.'

Red (Morgan Freeman) once says something about the walls that hold them prisoners, 'these walls are funny. First you hate them, then you get used to them. After long enough, you get so you depend on them'. That's why he believes 'hope is a dangerous thing. Hope can drive a man insane.'; and Brooks, the used-up old con as Red describes, can't help but hang himself after being released on parole (same as getting freed but treated like a freak). No doubt it's hard to break through the walls once you get on the inside. It's like you've been sleeping for too long so that you'd rather keep lying in and don't really wanna wake up to the truth itself. Would you choose to be institutionalized just like Red says in the film and enjoy an easy, ordinary life, or get ready to step on the bumpy road to enlightenment that'll ultimately free you from all kinds of pain? Most of the people I guess would do the former coz the fact is, not everyone has the terrible strength and perseverance as Andy does.

I never thought Stephen King famous for his gloom-and-doom stories would come up with such an inspirational story like this. I don't know why people were apt to turn it down (it failed to be a blockbuster and get any of the Oscars) and praise 'Forrest Gump' and Tarantino's 'Pulp Fiction' instead at the time? Its ending completely blew me away when I first watched it, coz I never thought Andy would be such extraordinary. And there's everything to do with Morgan Freeman's narrative to make it such a classic. He's capable of making even simple words sound so deep.

I guess why it's been deemed the greatest movie of all time is that we human beings do need hope to survive in good times or bad. The truth is, in this world like Shawshank State where those walls seem so strong and real, we all need this kind of redemption to set us free in a sense.