The Shawshank Redemption/Awesome

• Everything.
  • Seconded.
    • Thirded, fourth-ed, fifthed, you get the idea.
• The reveal of Andy Dufresne's escape, one of the most heartwarming stories on film despite its subject matter, provoked unfettered joy at his triumph.
  • Seconded, especially if you include Norton getting busted as part of the same moment. (And it's fairly reasonable, as they result from the same thing.) In this troper's opinion, the parts of the movie before that were above all else buildup to that moment, and the parts after that were just tying up loose ends.
• There's also the rooftop scene, with awesomeness coming from Andy and Captain Hadley with every line. "Sir, do you trust your wife?"
• Not to mention the scene where Andy plays "The Marriage of Figaro" over the prison's loudspeakers, and he's sitting back in the locked office when the Warden comes up to the door and orders him to turn it off. Andy reaches over to the record player -- then smiles slowly and turns the volume up.
• Andy doesn't have a monopoly on awesome. Red has one when he lectured the law people who would determine his parole. The law people in turn decide to be awesome by releasing him because of this.
  • That, or they just figured he sounded more sincere this time around.
  • It was a different (and probably less biased) group of people than the previous parole hearings, although presumably they did think he sounded sincere.
• The shot of Andy emerging from the sewer, running through the rain and standing with his arms in the air. Pure Brilliance.
  • It certainly helps the heavy amount of symbolism in that scene. It is Andy's personal redemption in the rain.
• The music is just fantastic. That set over Norton's threat to cast Andy "down with the sodomites" makes it all the more chilling, and is used to perfect effect to convince the audience that Andy's been pushed over the edge, making the ending the crowning moment it is.
• The little extra when the Warden is caught out. He rushes to his safe, and finds that the night before Andy put his copy of the Bible in instead of the log books. Even better, he left a note in the front 'You were right warden, salvation lay within' an Ironic Echo to something the warden had told him, and, as if their needed to be any more, the rock hammer was hidden so that when you opened it, the Warden opened it to 'Exodus.' Bad. Ass.
• When Andy talks the guys who are beating him up out of raping him using his knowledge of medical trivia.