Forbidden Planet at 50
Published on Apr 15, 2006 at 6:51 pm.
2 Comments.
Filed under science fiction.
Fifty years ago, the award winning classic science fiction movie Forbidden Planet was released. The movie predates me, but I did get to see it on television when I was young.
I have always rather enjoyed science fiction. Growing up, I used to watch scifi movies on TV whenever I got a chance. There was often one showing on Saturday afternoons, and for several years, there was a station that showed a scifi movie every Friday night. There was also a station that showed movies every weekday afternoon, with one day per week set aside as science fiction day. It was one of these afternoons, I think, that I first saw the movie. It made an impression that stuck with me, so when the movie came out on DVD a few years back, I just had to get it.
For those of you who don’t know the movie, the screenplay for Forbidden Planet was written by Cyril Hume, the movie was directed by Fred Wilcox and produced by Nicholas Nayfack. Forbidden Planet had an all star cast (or least a cast that were to be stars) including Walter Pidgeon, Leslie Nielson, Richard Anderson, and Anne Francis.
In the annals of science fiction films, this movie is a giant. It is a well thought out story with several sub-plots running. The movie has the sort of optimistic American ideals of the 1950’s and elements of the sort of fear of technology of that era. The movie also had a fairly sophisticated commentary on the state of humanity. Even the dialogue is good. For the 1950’s, the special effects were stupendous. Personally, I don’t think that any special effects equaled those of Forbidden Planet until Star Wars in the 1977. I showed this movie one night to the students of our astronomy club when it was too cloudy to go outside. The story is still good, and the special effects even hold up today, though they don’t look quite as sophisticated as we are used to seeing now-a-days. Several of the plot devices and ideas formed the basis of much of what we have come to think of as standard ideas in science fiction. You can see the legacy of Forbidden Planet in Star Wars, Star Trek, and all sorts of other stories.
The story of the movie is loosely based on Shakespeare’s The Tempest. The story starts with an interplanetary flying saucer from Earth coming to investigate why an expedition to the planet Alair-IV has apparently vanished. This saucer is part of a galactic space quasi-military space fleet (similar to Star Fleet). The captain and crew land on the planet, ignoring a broadcast warning that to land was to face great danger. Upon landing, a robot named Robby meets them and takes the captain, Commander Adams, and the ship’s doctor to meet the sole surviving member of the expedition, a man named Morbius. There they find Morbius living with his daughter Altaria and their robotic servant, Robby. Morbius claims that the original expedition had been killed by some sort of creature that for some reason has left him and his daughter alone for all these years. Morbius claims to have found knowledge left over from an ancient civilization that used to live on the planet. Commander Adams wants to take them back to Earth, but Morbius refuses, so Adams decides to use parts of his spaceship to fabricate an interstellar communication system to report home and get orders to deal with the situation. Soon, somehow the communicator is sabotaged. Adams suspects Morbius, but there is no proof. Eventually, a crewmember is gruesomely killed, and Adams heads to Morbius’ residence to demand answers. There, he and the doctor find that Morbius has discovered found actual working artifacts of the ancient beings called the Krel. They had a teaching tool that had taught him how to build Robby the robot. Underneath the Morbius residence is a massive Krel facility that goes on for miles and miles. It has been self sustaining and self repairing for millennia, though even Morbius has no idea what it does for sure. He suspects that the Krel were on the verge of developing a technology that would do all their work for them with just a thought. Adams and the doctor are impressed, but this does not help explain the loss of a crewmember. They go back to the spaceship where disintegrator cannon have been set up to protect the ship and crew. That night, a giant invisible monster attacks. The monster seems to resist their every weapon, and then it suddenly disappears. Decades later, I still had an image of the giant creature caught in the disintegrator beams where it became sort of visible. The special effects are obviously animation by hand drawing, but it still gives me a chill when I see it. Adams and the doctor go back to the Morbius residence, where they confront Morbius again. While Adams and Morbius argue, the doctor gets his brain boosted in the Krel machine, and he realizes the monster is actually a creature created by Morbius’ subconscious mind. The giant Krel machine had created it in response to Morbius’ subconscious (the Freudian id) desire to put an end to the people who disagreed with his wishes. Eventually his own daughter disobeys him and challenges him, and his Id Monster attacks. He eventually sacrifices himself to save his daughter. Adams takes Altaria and they leave for Earth. Their last act was to set the self destruct on the giant Krel machine.
Robby the robot is interesting in that he had built in programming that prohibited him from harming any human being. This predates Asimov’s laws of robotics. As I suggested, the Earth saucer is reminiscent of the Star Trek, with an organization like Star Fleet, and an intrepid captain and doctor rushing off into danger (though no Vulcan science officer!). The disintegrator ray guns seem to work a lot like phasers. Scenes of the Krel machine are seen in other science fiction movies and shows that follow, and they bear some resemblance to scenes in the interior of the Death Star in Star Wars. There are even force fields like seen in Lost in Space.
Forbidden Planet, at least, the technology is rather neutral. It is the use of the technology that gets everyone in trouble. In many of these movies, some technological or scientific advance is made without any regard for its moral consequences. Here, the Krel machine was designed with the high and noble goals of freeing the peaceful Krel from work so that they could concentrate on learning, poetry, art, and such. The problem was their baser instincts that the machine keyed on, and the Krel wound up killing themselves off. Then, when Morbius came to be connected with the machine, anyone crossing him got killed. The commentary here is that we all have a selfish and brutal side to us that we must keep under control. In Star Wars terms, we can all be tempted to the dark side. Again, this is a little different from other movies of the era, where some mad scientist is totally immoral. Here Morbius is essentially a good and caring person who would never consciously harm anyone. His subconscious, though, wishes harm to those who challenge him.
The movie is very interesting and thought provoking, and it deserves to be a classic. I think that even people who don’t normally like science fiction would find something of value here. If you haven’t seen Forbidden Planet, then you should! It is well worth your time.
-Astroprof
Astroprof’s Page » Burial in Space on April 30, 2007 at 12:12 am: 1
[…] In 1982, I went to see the movie Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan in the theater. Like many long time Trekies, I was shocked to find that Spock died in the movie. At the end of the movie was a scene where Spock was given a military funeral reminiscent of a naval burial at sea, only this was a burial in space. A photon torpedo tube was used as a coffin to fire his body into space. Spock was not the first fictional character to get a space burial. I can think of space burials in science fiction all the way back to the 1950’s, and there are probably several earlier than that. The 1955 film Conquest of Space had a space burial. And the 1956 film Forbidden Planet (one of my favorites) had scenes where crew members were buried on a distant planet. And, even the Disney film The Black Hole had a space burial scene. And, of course, there have been countless space burials in science fiction novels. […]
Peer Frinton on April 13, 2008 at 11:31 pm: 2
I saw Forbidden Planet as a six year old in 1956 when it came out, in a small theatre that still runs flicks- now ‘art’ movies.
I clearly remember the foreboding when the only signs of the Krel monster’s first visit are the sagging metal stairs.
And then the utter panic when the monster was able to penetrate the solid lead window shields. There was no question in my mind it was all real, even though by then I didn’t believe in Santa!
I even grasped the idea, if not the formal concept of the Id, at least the notion that by thinking bad thoughts, even involuntarily, could have disastrous consequences.
Hasn’t deterred me though!
Great movie….