The Shawshank Redemption: A Response Essay

Well, as is obvious, I thought that “The Shawshank Redemption” was absolutely incredible. I had seen parts of it before, but never the whole way through… and I can honestly tell you, how it ended is not at all how I had pictured it in my head.
It really brings to light how hope is a required human feeling if you’re going to properly make it through life. Before seeing this entire movie, I was one who advocated against hope, as I believed it automatically pulled you from the present into a future that was uncertain, and as such, you were no longer living in the moment, which can be potentially painfully tantalizing.
That’s not to say that it isn’t if you’re hoping to often and not living enough, but sometimes life is a bit of a downer, and you need that hope to help push you through properly to the next set of good times that are inevitably coming your way soon enough. As such, this movie has altered my philosophy to include hope, but not to any fundamentalist extreme, in which you are bitter towards life due to your lack of working towards any real goal, and instead ‘hoped’ that the good life would simply be handed to you on a silver platter. That is the arbitrary hope that led me to come to the conclusion that you should ‘never give into hope,’ when in fact, that may be all you have for a period within your life. Beyond that fact, who says hope is all about the future? Hope can also be a simple feeling; it doesn’t always need to relate to any previous or coming moment. As far as I can see, it’s just as much a feeling as happiness and anger, hate and love.
The setting of the movie was an incredibly appropriate one; a prison in which most, if not all of the inmates hadn’t seen the outside world in upwards of 30 years, and may not see it for 30 more, or ever again. In a situation such as that, you certainly need hope, otherwise you’ve got nothing.
The conflict was also incredibly appropriate, as it was every man against their inwards selves, and, of course later, a megalomaniacal dictator of a Warden, who decided he was going to use these prisoners as his pawns to meet his own ends.
The character development was also quite profound, as it shows how the Warden transformed from a humble, albeit selfish man; to the suicidal dictator he is at the movies resolution, as well as many of the prisoners changes in attitude towards themselves, the other prisoners, and the world at large, with most of them becoming fundamentally good people once again by the movies conclusion. Also, of course, there is the ending itself, which was absolutely incredible. Not only was the Warden thwarted, but it showed how every characters patience, persistence, perseverance, and hope paid off in the end just as well as they had hoped, and it’s true; this sort of thing really occurs in life, providing you do indeed stick with the above four principals, and are properly able to endure moments of personal failure, as well as learn from them.

So, live it up.