Shawshank redemption filmanalys

Summary of the movie Shawshank Redemption is a tale of two prison inmates who later become friends.?It all starts with Andy Dufresne who is a young and successful banker who later gets convicted for the murder of his wife and her lover. Andy is then sent to Shawshank prison where he is supposed to spend the rest of his life. At first Andy is very lonely and isolated. He doesn’t walk and talk like everybody else in there, he walks and talks like a free man, so he’s a bit of a ”weirdo” in the other inmates eyes. ??While Andy tries to adapt to prison life he is confronted by a prison gang, known as ”The Sisters”. Since it is an all male prison, the sisters aren’t exactly beautiful women but instead scary men.

The Sisters were horrible rapists who continuously kept on, it is assumed, raping and beating Andy down until one day when Andy said no. He got so beaten up that he had to spend a month in the infirmary and by that point Andy had gained the respect of the guards at the prison because he had been helping them with financial difficulties. This started when Andy, Red and some of the other convicts were working up on the roof of the prison and Captain Hadley started talking about his financial difficulties. Andy who was eager to make a change for himself offered his help. At first Hadley was thinking about throwing him of the roof but then he heard Andy out and decided to accept his help.

The message of Andy’s skills spread quickly along to the other guards and after a while, Andy was in charge of everybody’s economics. So after gaining the guards respect, when the leader of the sisters beat Andy up, the guards became angry and beat up the leader of the sisters, so bad that he spent the rest of his life in a wheelchair. By this point everybody had respect for Andy because he did what everybody else wanted to do, but what no one else dared to do. It gave hope, not just to the fellow prisoners, but also to Andy himself. ??After the beating and the month in the infirmary Andy was torn up and his new friend Red saw that. They began to speak and after a while they became really close. They both learned the meaning of true friendship after a few years of knowing each other. Red was the kind of guy that could get things in prison, for a price, of course. So anything you asked for, and payed for, he supplied. In the beginning of the film Andy seeks up Red and asks him for a item, a rock hammer. When Andy does so, Red looks at Andy in a funny way and implies that it would take forever to dig himself out of prison, if that was the purpose... Andy then replies with a mysterious smile that he is aware of that, but that he still wants the item. ??Trough the years that pass by in prison, Andy and Red develop their friendship into something really special and together they manage to change the prison in ways they thought was impossible, but with Andy’s will, nothing was impossible. Andy manages to get a library going and he also manages to get new books for the prison thanks to 5 years of incessant mailing. Eventually Andy achieves his ends on his own terms and believe it or not he attains an important role in the prison. As long as he does what is needed of him, from the warden Norton and by the guards, he is given perks inside of the prison. Instead of working with laundry every day, he is given a position in the library where he gets to work with a old man named Brooks. So eventually Andy has two jobs, laundering money for the warden and working in the library. In the library he started to teach and help other convicts get a degree and later in the film a new convict comes to the prison, a young man named Tommy.

Tommy was a tough street kid whom Andy immediately started to like so he decided to help him get a degree as well. By this they became close friends and gained a special bond and by time when they got to know each other Tommy told Andy a fact that could change his life, Tommy knew the real killer of Andy’s departed wife and her lover... He knew this due to the fact that he had been in prison before at another place where someone had told the story of the murder and that they later had pinned it on a banker, which Tommy understood directly was Andy after hearing Andy’s reason for being in jail. ?After Andy had heard the truth he went to the warden for help. Andy told him what had really happened and who the real killer was but the warden didn’t seem to care. He told Andy that it was unlikely to get another hearing and that no one would believe him, so Andy told the warden about his witness, Tommy. The warden then replied that Andy was naive to believe someone who was just trying to impress him with lies. Andy then asked the warden; ”How can you be so obtuse?” The warden hated being called dumb which resulted in that he became so angry that he had Andy sent to solitary for a hole month.??The thing was, the warden didn’t want Andy to be released from prison due to the fact that he was the mastermind behind the money laundering going on inside the prison and he also knew the wardens dirty secrets regarding the matter so he wanted to hush it down.

After the warden had spoken to Andy, he wanted to have a talk with Tommy. He requested to meet him out in the yard to question him regarding the matter. The warden asked Tommy if he stood behind what he had said earlier and also asked him if he would swear on in in front of a judge which he then replied ”Yes.” When he did so, the warden had him shot down, blaming it on that Tommy had tried to escape.

After that Tommy had been shot down the warden came to visit Andy after a month and told him the news, hoping that Andy would let go of his hope. The truth was that it took the life out of Andy and he understood what a living hell he was in, that there was no winning this. He managed to piss off the warden once again and was sentenced to another month in solitary and once he got out, he was a changed man. He was miserable on the outside, but on the inside he knew what he had to do. He told Red that if he ever would get out of the prison that he should go to a certain place and look for a certain box which contained what was to Red, a mystery. While he did this Red noticed that it was if Andy was saying goodbye for the last time.

Later during that night, Red was lying awake wondering if Andy’s cold body was hanging by a rope at that time and feared the morning to come. By the time it was time to get up and everyone was supposed to come out of their cells, Andy didn’t. The guard went inside of Andy’s cell in surprise when there was no visible body to be found. It was like he has vanished into thin air!

Earlier in the movie we had seen Andy with his rock hammer, doodling on the wall and that was all we had seen of that scene. What we got to see later in the film was that when he was doodling on the wall, a chunk of the wall fell out. After that Andy started digging a hole, he had a poster over the hole so that no one would notice it. He tunneled through the wall using his rock hammer. Then he used a large hard rock to break the sewage pipe and crawled through a hole 500 yards of sewage at his attempt to escape, in which he also succeeded.

After Andy has escaped from prison, he spends the rest of his life on a fishing boat living under a false identity which he created while he was laundering money, of course without the warden knowing it. This was the identity that had been getting all of the dirty money, so when Andy got out, he had quite a nice amount of money. He used this money to flee to mexico and by his fishing boat, and he also left some for Red, in Andy’s mysterious letter to him... But what happened to Red? After a while Red finally got probation which he had been seeking for the last 30 years he had been in jail.

When he was out he started working at the given place the jail had fixed for him. He was so lonely in the outside world but then one day he remembered what Andy had told him about that secret box at that special mysterious place under an oak tree. Red went there and to his surprise he there found a letter from his old friend, Andy Dufresne. In the letter was the location of where Andy was, and also a load of money. ??The story of Shawshank Redemption ends where we see Andy and Red being reunited at a beach and the fall of Shawshank’s workers. Andy had before sent a story to the news paper exposing what that was really going on in there, that the warden was laundering money and that the prisons officers where in on it. The head officer was captured and the warden killed himself before the police could get to him. And that is the entire tale of Shawshank Redemption. ? The films message?In the movie we learn a really important message; while the body may be locked away in a cell, the spirit can never truly be imprisoned. We get this message through Andy who through the whole film has hope that cannot be taken away from him. ?Key scenes?One of the key scenes in this film is where Tommy tells the true story of Andy’s wife and her lovers murderer, where we in the audience find out that Andy has been innocent all along. The moment when Andy finds out who really killed his wife and her lover, he is almost shocked, like it was a flash of good news that it wasn’t he that had killed them.

We know that he was planning on killing them, but we didn’t know if he went trough with it, until this scene, and I wonder... Maybe Andy didn’t know for sure himself? After finding out the truth he feels like a free man which pushes his ”want” to escape. ?This scene is also vital for us in the audience because we get a appreciation for how the film has developed. If it wasn’t for Andy being put in jail the story would have never gotten anywhere. None of what had happened in the story had actually had to happen, because Andy was innocent. We have trough the film seen him as guilty, and now we learn that he doesn't deserve to be in there, so we want him to escape as well. ??Another key scene is where Tommy is killed where he learns the brutality of prison, and he gains so much hatred that makes him want to take down the evil people who works there in which he later does when he comes out. The thing with this scene is that we as a audience also gain anger against the prison and the warden. This scene captures us into gaining respect for the main characters and we learn the feeling of Andy’s hatred. ??Another key scene is where we learn about Andy’s plan to escape and how he did it. We finally get to se his big master plan. As a viewing audience we get more involved with the story because of its intriguing story and the fact that the film actually manages to surprise us.

A conflict A conflict in the movie which says a lot, is where the librarian named Brooks has gotten fired from the prison library. Brooks then takes a knife to one of the convicts throats and says that it is the only way they’ll let him stay in his ”home”. Brooks who had been working at the prison library his whole life, didn’t have a outside world and a place to go to after he was done at the prison. He has become institutionalized within the prison walls and didn’t know anything else than life inside of it so wanted to stay inside the walls, where it was safe. Andy managed to calm him down before he did anything stupid and reminded him that it was a human beings life he had in his hands. Later Brooks was sent of into the real world where he became a depressed old man who later took his own life.

Characters: Main character To define the main character of the movie, we need to take a look at who it is that evolves the most trough the film, which in this movies case is the character Red. He goes from 0 - 100 when he starts out at the bottom, being a newly convicted murderer and a tough man who first starts to change when Andy comes into his life.

Protagonist #1 Without the character Andy in the movie the film would have stood still. He is the character that makes everything happen = the protagonist, also the good guy. He changes the main characters life by setting it in motion. He does this by gaining the respect of Red, and then sharing thoughts with him which makes Red develop as a character which in its end changes Red life. For example, if Andy and Red wouldn’t have become friends, Red would never have left the prison at the end because through out the friendship with Andy, Red is taught the cruelty that is life. When Red later goes to a probation hearing he speaks the truth and nothing but it. They are impressed with his realization and let him go on probation.

Andy as main character? Many might be confused and think that Andy is the main character but that would make Red the protagonist, but that wouldn’t be true. If Andy was in fact the main character he would also be his own protagonist because he would be making the trip himself.

Protagonist #2 Another protagonist is the young man Tommy. Without him Andy would lack of motivation to take down the prison and his want to escape. But why is that? Tommy who quickly becomes close friends with Andy, is the messenger of the best news Andy had ever heard. He knew the true killer of Andy’s departed wife and her lover. And for that, he is killed. Reasons being why he was killed I mentioned earlier above. As I also mention earlier, this triggers Andy to get revenge and to escape from the living hell he is in. You could say that Tommy is the protagonists protagonist.? The antagonist The antagonist of the story is mainly the warden. He wants the main characters progress to stop and does so with trying to repeditaly defeat the protagonist by locking him up in solitary to destroy his hope and by murdering his Andy’s own protagonist, Tommy. ?The warden Norton sees himself like a god, the god of Shawshank. The warden is a religious man and sees himself like the God of Shawshank. He treats his prisoners like he pleases, this we learn when he says in the very beginning; ”I believe in two things: discipline and the Bible. Here you'll receive both. Put your trust in the Lord; your ass belongs to me. Welcome to Shawshank.” By this we understand, he will do anything in his power to make sure we don’t come back to the point of the characters lives where they free. Doing anything he can to counter the protagonist.

My own thoughts regarding the film?I personally really liked the movie, but I loved the ending. I liked it a lot due to that it was so inspiring and truthful. It showed us that there is always hope and that no soul can truly be locked up inside a cage. I also think that the movie captured the prison theme quite well with the brutality. It gives you a scare of how horrible your life could be if you committed a crime. Another thing is that the movie really captures us and we learn to feel like we are inside those walls beside of Andy and it makes us a part of the hole story. In the movie I think it’s Andy who says “I had to come to prison to become a crook”. This one line is consuming, it makes us understand at a deeper level of what they must go trough in there to survive. The portrayal of the prison environment is accurate to me. I have personally never been to prison and I’m pretty sure I never will, but after watching other movies about prison in the U.S and interviews with former criminals I believe that the portrayal is accurate at that displayed time in the film, which was in the 1960’s. Todays prisons are less brutal due to the bettering of human rights. Today torture is forbidden in the U.S prisons and prisoners are taken more care of.

Stereotypes in the film?In the film we quickly get introduced to the clever/cunning inmate Red who is one of the prisons ”fixers”. He’s the guy you go to if you need anything or any favors, which you of course later have to repay. He is a ...