So Many Books; So little Time

Ghost Rider

Ghost Rider

Starring Nicholas Cage

I don’t watch a lot of movies but my son wanted to see this one, so I sat down and watched it with him. Now, I’ve seen several of Nicholas Cage’s movies and some are good and some are bizarre but this one was interesting in more ways than one.

This movie asks several questions of Cage and his character and, by default, us. First, what would give for the health of someone you love? Second, if you sell your soul to the devil, will God give you a second chance? Third, are there rules when dealing with demons?

Cage plays daredevil Johnny Blaze who is much like Evel Knevel. He learned the trade from his father who is dying of lung cancer at the beginning of the movie. Johnny is in love with a beautiful girl whose father doesn’t approve of him so the two decide to run away together.

Enter a demon played by Peter Fonda. He offers to cure Johnny’s father in return for a signature. But a drop of blood falsely acquired will do. And the next day, Johnny’s father is completely cured. Only to die in a jump crash that night. When Johnny demands an explaination, he is told that the father would have come between him and the demon.

Skip ahead a few years to a now famous Johnny Blaze who jumps recklessly trying to prove that he is the one jumping and that he isn’t being helped by the demon who owns his soul. Or is he really trying to die? And what of all the books he reads on the supernatural?

What Johnny really wants is to be free and to find out if God will give him a second chance. And into that scenario his now ex-fiance Roxanne and the demon both reappear in his life. Roxanne to do an interview and the demon to require payment after which he promises to return Johnny’s soul. Johnny must find the contract for 1,000 evil souls that was stolen by another Ghost Rider over 100 years ago. And in doing it, he must fight four other demons to beat them to the contract.

What I found most interesting though, came at the end of the movie. Johnny manages to defeat three of the demons but comes up against a problem with the fourth. As a Ghost Rider, Johnny has the ability to tell evil souls from innocent souls. When he looks into the eyes of an evil soul, he has the ability to make that person feel the anguish of all his or her victims. Of course, this doesn’t work on the demons having never been human themselves.

But then comes the contract of the 1,000 souls. And here we have our Ghost Rider caught between two demons who both want the contract. One owns Johnny’s soul and offers it back in return for the contract and the other…..is willing to fight for it.

Johnny does the unexpected. He gives the contract not to the demon who owns his soul but to the demon he intends to defeat.

Why? Because at that point, the demon acquires the souls of the evil humans on the contract into his body and Johnny can make him, through those evil humans, FEEL the anguish of all the victims of all the innocents they victimized.

And it was in that one scene that I got a picture of what it must have been like for Jesus to hang on the cross. Because there he felt the anguish of all the evil that has been done upon the earth. Not just a thousand souls worth of evil but billions upon billions of souls worth of evil.

Not a movie for kids but there’s not a lot of language, no sexual content, and really no drinking or smoking in the movie either. This is a movie for those who like action and psychological thrillers. This is good versus evil in all it’s ugliness but is not bloody or profane.