Review of The Ghost Rider (1935) by Fredric W — 18 Feb 2007

Not half as bad as some would have us believe... although Nic Cage is no Johnny Blaze, that's for sure.

Always interesting to watch people beat up on a comic-book movie. What the hell else did they expect it to be?

All I know is: the f/x are damn good, and that's all I really care about.

[QUOTE]Nicolas Cage molded his "hard drinking and smoking bad ass" character Johnny Blaze to have more depth. "I'm playing him more as someone who... made this deal and he's trying to avoid confronting it, anything he can do to keep it away from him." Cage also explained that Blaze's stunt riding was a form of escape and a way to keep him connected to his deceased father, who taught him to ride.

Cage rode a Buell motorcycle for Blaze's stunt cycle, and a chopper named "Grace", which transforms into the "Hell Cycle", along with the character.

The Hell Cycle's wheels, made of pure flames in the comics, were changed to be solid tires covered in flames in order to give the motorcycle more weight onscreen.

To express emotion, Ghost Rider's skull flames were designed to change color, such as being toned down and blue when sad.

The film's visual effects supervisor, Kevin Mack, and his team at Sony Imageworks handled the difficult task of creating computer-generated fire on a shot-by-shot basis.

Ghost Rider's voice was manipulated by sound designer Dane Davis, who won an Academy Award for Sound Editing for [i]The Matrix[/i]. Davis filtered Cage's line readings through three different kinds of animal growls that were played backwards and covered separate frequencies. Davis then amplified the dialogue through a mechanical volumizer. Director Johnson described the sound as a "deep, demonic, mechanical lion's roar".[[/QUOTE].

[center][size=4]actual - 6.9[/size].

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