MUCH better than The Shawshank Redemption!!! for quite a few reasons.

Rating: 10/10 (28 August 2002)

Before comparing it to The Shawshank Redemption as almost everyone did, I'd like to tell the reasons for this movie being one of my top 5. I'd very like to tell, but... I just have no words. I can't express with my personal thesaurus what I felt after the movie ended, and what I feel now, several WEEKS after watching it. Let's just say I had a hard time coming back from it's world to ours. Every second of it is rivetting, every moment evokes a different emotion, every line is affecting, every scene will leave its mark in your mind. It isn't perfect, no, but the only thing I find fault with is the last scene with the old Tom Hanks' character (way too long, way too detailed... I wish I could have reedited it!) But I don't want to dwell upon this, so I'll just explain why I think Green Mile is much better than The Shawshank Redemption (and why Shawshank doesn't deserve its 2nd place on the IMDB top 250):
1. The most important thing: at first it seems that except of the prison aspect (and the director, and the original writer) Green Mile and Shawshank aren't similar at all. However, they ARE similar - they're both FANTASY. But whilst Green Mile focused on fantasy and produced the best of it, Shawshank pretended to be a realistic drama and completely failed, and I mean FAILED! Eventually The Green Mile's story came out more believable than Shawshank's! (If the last sentence sounds ridiculous to you - try to recall the American History X scenes of Edward Norton's character's prison times and compare them to the events that happened to Andy in The Shawshank Redemption. You'll get it.)
2. The Green Mile is much more EMOTIVE than Shawshank, it evokes a wilder range of feelings. There's MUCH more humor, more drama and even more suspense, even though both movies are pretty predictable. The ending is also not a banal "happy end". There are more different characters and the sympathy is greater, we get to know them better then we do in Shawshank.
3. The Green Mile consists from a beautiful exciting story NEXT TO some profound and important issues, such as the death-sentence and death in general. These subjects move anybody immediately, and in Green Mile particularly, as they shown in an EXTREMELY intense and disturbing way. Shawshank, IMO, is lacking these things, this big impact. You maybe get from it some messages about hope and stuff, but they're not as strong and impressive.
4. And finally the actors. With all the (great) respect to Morgan Freeman, nothing can be compared to the remarkable performances of the whole Green Mile cast (don't forget the mouse!:)). Their characters were transferred so well that you could feel for them. Superb, exquisite, those words are too weak to depict Tom Hanks' performance, his incredible facial expressions, his outstanding acting. Every movie is better with Tom Hanks, but this time he surpassed himself. And so is Michael Clarck Duncan (after the whole nine yards.. :))
10/10