The Shawshank Redemption
Directed by Frank Darabont
This movie is about a man named Andy Dufresne who is wrongly convicted of murdering his wife and her lover and is sent to Shawshank Prison to serve two consecutive life sentences. Andy is a very intelligent banker who soon starts doing the taxes of guards and is eventually doing money laundering for the warden himself. After 19 years in jail, Andy escaped. It is revealed that over the entire time he had been in the prison, he had been digging out of his cell with a tiny rock hammer, hiding the tunnel with various large posters of famous actresses of the time. In the end Andy is shown on a beach in Mexico being joined by his prison friend Red.
The plot is very clever in the way that many little events and details contribute to Andy’s escape. Throughout the whole movie, the viewer is given hints but only at the end, when the conclusion starts to unravel are they shown to be significant events in regards to the escape.
The movie is narrated by Ellis ‘Red’ Redding, a long-time prisoner expecting to stay in prison until he grows very old. Red tells the story of Andy’s prison stay, from the moment he arrives at Shawshank, to his escape and explains how he managed it.
The plot unfolds in chronological order up until the point where the prison guards find Andy’s cell empty one morning. Here, flashbacks of the previous few hours are used to show the details of how Andy escaped through his tunnel and crawled five hundred metres through a sewage drain to freedom where he donned a suit and made off with thousands of dollars worth of Warden Norton’s dirty money.
Most of this movie was filmed in an unused prison, obviously making the setting seem very realistic. Colour was used well, all colours were very dull. The concrete walls and bars were various shades of grey. The only real colour came from the uniforms of the prisoners – a muted, dirty dark blue. These dull colours provoke an appropriate emotional...