The Shawshank Redemption vs. The Green Mile

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Which one is better/which one do you like more?
87.76%
43 votes
The Shawshank Redemption
12.24%
6 votes
The Green Mile
49 votes. You may not vote on this poll




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I was just wondering what some of your thoughts were on this question. Which one do you think is better/which one do you like more? Answer the poll and post your thoughts.
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Definitely have to go with The Shawshank Redemption. I like The Green Mile quite a bit; it's quotable, beautifully photographed, and genuinely heart-wrenching. But it's just not quite as smart as Shawshank, and has less replay value.



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Definitely have to go with The Shawshank Redemption. I like The Green Mile quite a bit; it's quotable, beautifully photographed, and genuinely heart-wrenching. But it's just not quite as smart as Shawshank, and has less replay value.
I agree. The Green Mile torn my heart out tonight, actually. Even so, I can't lay claim of it being better then Shawshank.



The Green Mile is better as a book IMO, but as for movies: Shawshank certainly.
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Shawshank for me too. I enjoyed the intelligence behind the main character and his will to survive. It was also more reality based (which intrigued me more) as opposed to the 'fantasy' theme of the Green Mile.



I ain't gettin' in no fryer!
I liked the fact that Shawshank was more believeable and you wanted to see Andy make it out.
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I don't like either one. But The Green Mile is unwatchable, so I'll give a default nod to Shawshank. But frankly I'd rather stare at the ceiling than watch either one.
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For me..its really hard to say. They both tell and incredible story, the acting is brilliant, the screenplay is dead on...green mile took tears outta me, shawshank made me feel damn good about the entirety of the story..hard to tell really. i cant vote



I love both, but I gave my vote to Shawshank.
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I voted for Shawshank... I wonder what Stephen King would say seeing as how he wrote both the stories. And while I thought The Green Mile stayed closer to the original book's story Shawshank is really a better film even with all the liberties that were taken with it. Morgan Freeman was just so good in that film.
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I was just wondering what some of your thoughts were on this question. Which one do you think is better/which one do you like more? Answer the poll and post your thoughts.
Shawshank pretends to be about real people in a real prison, but then violates the principles of reality. 1. How does one start to cut a two ft square escape hole at chest level in a wall without being spotted in the early stages? Won't the guards get suspicious if he's standing with his upper body under the poster chipping away? Tunnels start out of the guards' sight, in the lower wall beneath the bunk or in the floor. But the story is based on movie star posters, so the escape hole has to be chest high on a wall. Which would make it awfully difficult to climb in and out without attracting attention. (Were movie posters as readily available in the 40s-50s, whenever the guy goes to prison as in the 1960s to present, which is the memory period of young movie goers? I don't remember anyone decorating their walls with movie star posters back then.)

2. The guard and warden allows a prisoner to have a geologist's pick? Forget escaping, that would make a hell of a lethal weapon.

3. How does one coordinate with the random thunder of a rainstorm so that it covers up the sound of the escapee beating a hole through an iron pipe?

4. The escapee uses a hunk of concrete to knock a hole in an iron pipe. How does he know the chunck of concrete will be there? And which is more likely to shatter when banged together with great force, concrete or iron?

5. How does he know where the pipe will come out?

6. And even if he gets out and washes off the smell, how does he get out of the area on foot before the search begins?

The Green Mile, on the other hand, is a fairy tale where miracles occur, the sick are cured, the dead are brought back to life, and men and mice live for 60-70 years. It's not held to any standards of reality.

Moreover, Green Mile is more upbeat with its belief in miracles and redemption. Moreover, there's a bonding among people--most of the prisoners and most of the guards bond with each other. I got no real sense of bonding between the two main characters in Shawshank. They respect each other, maybe like each other a little, but they're never that close. When the bookkeeper gets the beer for the rest of the guys tarring the prison roof, he sits apart, not drinking with them, just enjoying the fact that he could manipulate the guards to give them some beer. On top of that, he suffers the same problem as Montgomery Clift's character in A Place in the Sun (1951)--he didn't actually murder his wife and her lover, but he did want them dead. As the priest tells Clift before his execution, he's still just as guilty in his heart as if he had killed them.



I ain't gettin' in no fryer!
The guard and warden allows a prisoner to have a geologist's pick? Forget escaping, that would make a hell of a lethal weapon.
Andy and Red have a conversation about this when Andy first asks Red to acquire the item. The shear size of the item leads one to believe that it would take forever to dig a route out. Plus, neither the guard nor the warden know the item exists because Andy used his bible to hide it.

How does one coordinate with the random thunder of a rainstorm so that it covers up the sound of the escapee beating a hole through an iron pipe?
There are many things to consider for this one. For one, the walls were pretty thick when you consider how long it takes him to crawl through his hand-carved hole. So that could muffle the sound from that angle. As far as the thunder...I'm sure we've all been in one of those storms that is just so loud you can't hear yourself think. That could've been one of those.

The escapee uses a hunk of concrete to knock a hole in an iron pipe. How does he know the chunck of concrete will be there? And which is more likely to shatter when banged together with great force, concrete or iron?
He probably carved that chunk out while digging his hole. Since he claimed to be a rockhound, he knew what kind of rock it was, how thick it would have to be, etc.

How does he know where the pipe will come out?
Supposing since he worked in the Warden's office, he probably saw blueprints to the complex, and saw where pipes ran.

And even if he gets out and washes off the smell, how does he get out of the area on foot before the search begins?
Given the time of the matter, and the fact that the guards weren't really vigil to begin with, or he wouldn't have had a giant hole in the wall, I'm guessing he was probably betting on the fact they wouldn't discover him gone until the next morning.

Now, while I'm not trying to debunk all your reasons for why you feel that Shawshank is less superior to The Green Mile, I think if you give Shawshank repeated viewings you'll catch subtle things you might miss the first or second time around.



Lost in never never land
Not a fan of either of these movies, I would give the edge to The Shawshank Redemption, but not a film that I really want to see again ever.
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Shawshank Redemption by a long shot . Even though i didn't really like either that much - the green mile's last half hour just threw away what story they had and tried to make the saddest possible ending ever. Shawshank redemptions ending however was my favorite part of the movie .
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Andy and Red have a conversation about this when Andy first asks Red to acquire the item. The shear size of the item leads one to believe that it would take forever to dig a route out. Plus, neither the guard nor the warden know the item exists because Andy used his bible to hide it.


There are many things to consider for this one. For one, the walls were pretty thick when you consider how long it takes him to crawl through his hand-carved hole. So that could muffle the sound from that angle. As far as the thunder...I'm sure we've all been in one of those storms that is just so loud you can't hear yourself think. That could've been one of those.


He probably carved that chunk out while digging his hole. Since he claimed to be a rockhound, he knew what kind of rock it was, how thick it would have to be, etc.


Supposing since he worked in the Warden's office, he probably saw blueprints to the complex, and saw where pipes ran.


Given the time of the matter, and the fact that the guards weren't really vigil to begin with, or he wouldn't have had a giant hole in the wall, I'm guessing he was probably betting on the fact they wouldn't discover him gone until the next morning.

Now, while I'm not trying to debunk all your reasons for why you feel that Shawshank is less superior to The Green Mile, I think if you give Shawshank repeated viewings you'll catch subtle things you might miss the first or second time around.
Spudracer, you use your imagination to come up with several possibilities to help explain the circumstances but it's pure supposition. What I mean is, you're doing all the work to explain how Andy made his escape, while the playwright and director provide no backup information to support those points.
For instance, "Supposing since he worked in the Warden's office, he probably saw blueprints to the complex, and saw where pipes ran." Do wardens normally have in their pocession blueprints of their prisons, and if so, would those blueprints simply be stuck in a drawer accessable to trustees? Does your employer have a blueprint of the building where you work? Do you have a blueprint of the house where you live? Sure, a blueprint would explain how Andy had knowledge of the prison sewer system, but in real life relatively few people have interest in or access to blueprints of buildings, especially buildings in which they are incarcerated.

As for Andy being a rockhound, for all I know, he may have been a trained geologist who just happened to be working as a banker-bookkeeper. But I don't think knowledge of rocks carries over to man-made material such as concrete, which would be more in the line of a construction engineer. Even if we accept that Andy knows as much about rocks and concrete as he does about bookeeping, how big a hunk of concrete could he repeatedly raise above his head and smash down on the iron pipe he's straddling? 50 lbs, 25 lbs, less? And if you bang iron and concrete together, which is more likely to break first? To quote Sancho in Man of La Mancha, "It doesn't matter if the pitcher hits the rock or the rock hits the pitcher, it's going to be bad for the pitcher," or in this case, the concrete.

We do agree that the prison guards were less than vigilant! But even so, how much lead time does Andy have when he makes his escape? I don't know the schedule at prisons, but when I was in the Army back in the '60s, it was lights out in the barracks about 10 p.m. and reville around 6-6:30 a.m., sometimes earlier. If the prison ran on the same institutional time frame, Andy would probably wait an hour or two for everyone to go to sleep, then make his way through the tunnel, smash open the pipe, and wiggle his way to freedom. That would take at least a couple of hours, don't you think? I would guess more, but say he gets out of prison and washed off by 2 a.m., he's got at most 4.5 hours to put distance between himself and the prison. How many miles could Andy walk in an hour through a blinding rain? Three, maybe four? I mean, here's a guy who has been in prison and working behind a desk for years, so how fit is he? Say he can really make time, 5 mph on the level surface of a road. But would he take the road where he's easily spotted if a vehicle comes by? Or does he go cross country at a slower speed tracking through the mud? And does he wear his prison uniform or go naked? Somewhere along the way, he's got to get clothing of some kind and transportation. So at the very most, Andy can cover 22.5 miles before he's missed and an alarm is sounded. Standard procedure is to immediately shut off and search the area within a certain radius of the prison in hopes of finding the prisoner hiding or finding someone who has seen him or finding someone whose car or bicycle or other transport has been stolen. I just don't think Andy the bookeeper could have made such an escape. But it's just a movie, so the writer and director count on us to cut them all the slack they want, just so they can use the gimmick of putting a movie poster on the wall so the Warden can throw a rock through it.



I haven't seen the green mile.
Everything about The Shawshank Redemption was good. But the fact that his wife slept with another guy and he went to jail for someone else killing that guy was extremely sad. I can't take it. lol
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I ain't gettin' in no fryer!
Spudracer, you use your imagination to come up with several possibilities to help explain the circumstances but it's pure supposition. What I mean is, you're doing all the work to explain how Andy made his escape, while the playwright and director provide no backup information to support those points.
Rufnek, you're right. Most of my possibilities were made from shear imagination. Naturally, me being in the military, I don't have access to blueprints and such like that, because I'm not privvy to that sort of thing. I'm not entirely sure how prisons run, but I would bet that the warden would have to know every nook and cranny of his prison in order to properly direct guards to search certain areas if there were a break. At least I would.

Originally Posted by rufnek
As for Andy being a rockhound, for all I know, he may have been a trained geologist who just happened to be working as a banker-bookkeeper. But I don't think knowledge of rocks carries over to man-made material such as concrete, which would be more in the line of a construction engineer.
Again, I don't totally disagree with you, but concrete is concrete, and the ingredients needed for concrete are not uncommon. There is a scene where we see Andy studying the chunk of wall that dropped out while he was carving in the wall.

How many miles could Andy walk in an hour through a blinding rain? Three, maybe four? I mean, here's a guy who has been in prison and working behind a desk for years, so how fit is he? Say he can really make time, 5 mph on the level surface of a road. But would he take the road where he's easily spotted if a vehicle comes by? Or does he go cross country at a slower speed tracking through the mud? And does he wear his prison uniform or go naked? Somewhere along the way, he's got to get clothing of some kind and transportation.
You're forgetting that he had the warden's suit and dress shoes. Naturally, he wouldn't want to change right into that since he would be using that later on, but he had clothes.

As for the rain...who's to say it rained much longer after he got out of the pipe. It could've stopped raining shortly after he crawled out. Now who's using their imagination.

You make valid points, well, we both do. Of course, everyone will always have different interpretations of films.

Rufnek, I know you've said you're former Army, but don't let the words of a Navy man get to you.



You make valid points, well, we both do. Of course, everyone will always have different interpretations of films.

Rufnek, I know you've said you're former Army, but don't let the words of a Navy man get to you.
At ease, Spudracer. The Army was never a home to me--I was a lousy soldier. All spit, no polish, constantly in trouble for talking back to non-coms, failing to salute officers, and sleeping on guard. Once went AWOL for a couple of days without being caught. Got nothing against the Navy either--my oldest son joined the Navy just before Desert Storm

And I certainly don't dislike Shawshank. I'm a longtime fan of Freeman and of the guy who played Andy although I never seem to remember his name (Tim something? From The Player and Bull Durham and Hudsucker Proxy). More important, I'm a looooooong time fan of James Whitmore, who as always was great in that film.

You're right, too, about me forgetting some of the details like the rock hammer in the hollowed out Bible (but that's such an old trick, you'd think Bibles would be the first things guards would search in periodic shakedowns) and the fact he stole the Warden's suit and shoes (which goes to show he was better prepared than I thought, although there's not much that will attract attention quicker than a man in a muddy suit and tie).

Funny thing is, I have a tape of Shawshank but not one of Green Mile. Saw a little bit of the end of Green Mile the other night on TV. It's still a good movie. I remembered that Stephen King wrote the story from which Shawshank was adapted but had forgotten (or maybe never knew) he wrote The Green Mile. It's funny that I like those films because I sure don't like King as a writer.