Odd that this movie is so high on the IMDB top-250....

Rating: Null/10 (14 April 2002)

I actually can't see how TSR wound up so high in the IMDB top-250.
It was a fine movie in many ways, but I was disappointed that it didn't meet the expectations that had been planted in my mind by friends and family that wanted me to see it. I had been led to believe that it was going to be a profoundly "impactful" insight into the nature of love, brotherhood, the struggle for freedom, and, of course, redemption. The movie for me was a little muddied by a couple of things.
And it's hard to pin down. I guess there was something "dirty" about the idea that the redemption took the form of everything turning out rosy and perfect for Our Heroes; that it was an outer redemption, rather than an inner redemption. It just felt as though the level of insight I was expecting would have to look a little more different from the "standard" (as it were) firehose of hollywoodesque plot twists, black/white hat-ism, and rosy outcome. To give you an idea of where I'm coming from, the redemption scene at the end of...Eraserhead(!)...is cleaner in my mind than Shawshank, just because we are forced to fill in the blanks left by a totally alien projection of spiritual struggle. When we fill in the blanks, we have to draw upon the (in this case) redemption "within us"; Shawshank seems to be attempting to fill in all the blanks, leaving nothing for us to do. And, as I already said, some of the fill is questionable in my mind.
Lastly, I was unable to pick up on a key plot element toward the end; how exactly did Andy "nail" the prison officialdom? It appeared he was able to "hip" state oversight to the egregious abuses of power; but that a mere prisoner--even one vested with a certain amount of bureaucratic access--should be able to accomplish this seems impossible, and I was not even able to make out the general contours of such a mechanism in the movie. I'll admit I might maybe have to see the movie again. And the movie was good enough that I might well do just that. But, again, when friends/family/IMDB-user-commenters said this was a billion thumbs-up movie, I expected something somehow more challenging.