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• Adaptation Displacement
• Award Snub: Probably the Most Egregious Example. It won absolutely nothing.
• Complete Monster: Quite a few. It's a prison flick.
  • Warden Norton, who doesn't quite seem like this at first until he has Tommy murdered just to continue exploiting Andy. He gets Laser-Guided Karma, eventually.
  • The Sisters.
  • Elmo Blatch. But unlike the others, he never gets any comeuppance, as far as we know.

• Crowning Moment of Awesome: In the finale, Andy manages to escape Shawshank and convict the Warden and make it to Mexico under a false identity.
  "Andy Dufrense, the man who crawled through a river of shit and came out clean on the other side."
• Crowning Moment of Heartwarming: Red walking up the beach at the end.
• Crowning Music of Awesome: The score is written by Thomas Newman. Beautiful music is a given.
  • Also, the song (Taken from The Marriage of Figaro) that Andy plays to the entire prison while inside the warden's office.
• Ear Worm: The music that plays when the police are coming to get Captain Hadley and Warden Norton.
• Family Unfriendly Aesop: The storyline implies that it is justifiable to unlawfully escape from prison in a society that thinks you are a murderer, if you were wrongfully convicted. It also implies that it is justifiable to engage in all kinds of sneaky treachery, including setting up a complex scheme to launder money for one person, so long as you plan on using that same scheme to expose the person you were laundering money for as a crook. In other words, this movie implies that ends justify means. Yes, it has family-friendly aesops as well (the themes of hope and perseverance come to mind), but the moral perspective implied from some aspects of the movie (especially the scheming, underhanded nature of the protagonist) is quite at odds with more conventional forms of morality.
  • Well, Andy says it himself - he Had to Come to Prison to Be a Crook.
• Fandom Rivalry: In 2008, a somewhat complicated series of votes on IMDb to give The Dark Knight the spot on the Top 250 as the #1 film of all time (that was from The Godfather) ultimately led to Shawshank topping the list. The Godfather had held that position for quite a long stretch of time, and its fans were, to put it mildly, not impressed; even now, over a year later, a visit to Shawshank's IMDb forums reveals thread after thread attacking it as unworthy of being #1 (and, implicitly or explicitly, favouring The Godfather).
  • This makes the movie inevitably Hilarious in Hindsight when you think about the Robot Chicken sketch where... well, you know.
• Faux Symbolism
• Hilarious in Hindsight: The guard in the movie is played by Clancy Brown, who's best known to Western Animation aficionados as Lex Luthor in various DCAU productions. As of 2011, the guy who played Boggs is now Lex Luthor in a different universe. That's right - this movie features Lex Luthor beating up Lex Luthor.
• Hype Backlash
• It Was His Sled: Andy escapes from Shawshank prison.
• Memetic Mutation: The scene where Andy plays opera music for the prison has been edited many times on YouTube. Said opera music has been replaced by various kinds of music, from pop music to heavy metal, and even by flea market ads. To be fair, the reactions of the prisoners and the warden made it pretty ripe for parody.
• Moral Event Horizon: The Warden ordering the death of a recently transferred con (Tommy) who has evidence of Andy's innocence, so that Andy will be forced to continue working at the prison.
  • Also, Hadley crossed this when he threatened to throw Andy off the roof and pretend Andy fell off. Beating up the emotionally-overwhelmed inmate earlier on could be excused by claiming he did it to deter other prisoners from making noise, but his later threat has no excuse.
• Rewatch Bonus: The surprise inspection scene. The tension. We weren't aware of Andy's digging-a-tunnel project by then. When the warden talks about the poster and almost forgot to return Andy's bible...
• Some Anvils Need to Be Dropped: Hope is a good thing.
• Stoic Woobie: Andy of course, given what he goes through, and the point that he did not commit the double-murder he is in jail for.
• Tear Jerker: "Brooks was here." Buckets.
  • "So was Red."
  • Tommy's death was absolutely heartbreaking, given how it was so sudden, swift and cruel. It wasn't in the novella, however.
  • And there's tears of joy for the entire finale.
• Unfortunate Implications: Either averted or subverted, depending on how you interpret the scene. The Sisters take a liking to Andy. Red and Andy discuss this with the following exchange:
  Andy: "I suppose it wouldn't help if I told them I wasn't homosexual."
  Red: "Neither are they. Gotta be human first. They don't qualify."
• The Woobie: Tommy. Poor kid works his ass off to make something of himself and is more than eager to help Andy. Then he gets murdered by Hadley.
  • The other prisoners (the ones who aren't completely horrible people, which is most of them) tread the line between this and Jerkass Woobie. Including Red.