Ten Things I Love About “Forbidden Planet”

Author’s Note: A few days ago I saw that a remake of the sci-fi classic Forbidden Planet is in the works. So, I thought I’d repost a short essay I wrote about it some years back on my old blog, Bakhtin’s Cigarettes. Enjoy!

The first DVD I bought was Blade Runner. The second was Forbidden Planet. This latter film is a science fiction classic from Hollywood’s second golden age, 1956 (the same year that John Ford’s landmark film The Searchers was released).  Perhaps the definitive pulp sci-fi movie, it’s got everything you might expect: stalwart heroes, spaceships, lasers, aliens, a teen-aged hottie, a mad scientist, and even a talking robot.

And monsters, of course. Monsters from the Id.

Ever since I first saw Forbidden Planet on TV when I was kid, I’ve loved it.  Here are ten reasons why…

1.) Altair IV

Forbidden Planet is, to my knowledge, the first Hollywood movie to depict human beings landing a spaceship on a planet of another star. This was a fairly landmark achievement in the history of science fiction cinema, made even better by the film’s two art directors, Cedric Gibbons and Arthur Lonergan. In their vision, Altair becomes a green- and blue-tinged desert, not unlike that of John Ford’s American Southwest. Considering this was done with matte paintings and other pre-CGI effects, it’s amazing how good the landscapes are, so desolate and full of foreboding.  It’s a prefiguration of all the wild worlds of Star Wars, Star Trek, and so on, yet to come.

2.) Morbius’s House

I love architecture almost as much as science fiction. And so, for me, the look of Dr. Morbius’s futuristic ranch house was truly epic. With its triangular arches and glass-and-stone interior, the house looks like a nuclear-powered Googie hybrid of Frank Lloyd Wright and Richard Neutra.

More importantly, it seems to represent every dream of suburban luxury that returning World War II soldiers must have harbored—the kitchen table laden with food, the coffee maker brewing automatically, the pool outside reflecting the perfect, modernist garden garden beyond. There’s even a gorgeous girl traipsing around in beach-wear.  Which leads me to…

3.) Anne Francis

In the hands of a lesser actress, the role of Alta (short for “Altair”) Morbius might have degraded into daft sex-kitten territory. But somehow, Anne Francis manages to infuse the character with spunk, depth, sympathy, and even a hint of proto-feminism.  Yeah, I know—she spends most of the movie fabricating a dress that will attract the attention of the newly arrived space captain, Adams. But even she seems to know how absurd this is—the notion that she, in all her nubile glory, should need to exert any effort to attract a man (especially one who hasn’t seen a girl in fifty light-years). She resists Adam’s wildly chauvinistic attitudes with as much ferventness as a female character could wield in 1956. And, of course, she gets the better of him.

4.) Leslie Nielsen

Speaking of Adams, Leslie Nielsen is perfect as the lantern-jawed Commander of Starship C-57D. Adams epitomizes the stereotype of every starship officer from past and present, starting with Amazing Stories in the 1930s and onward to Star Trek. Like his crew, Adams is brave, intelligent, conformist, and incredible white. (One gets the impression that they have subsisted on cheese-and-mayo sandwiches for most of their long space journey.)

Even so, the actors are first-rate. They seem to all to know that they’re making a silly science fiction movie but have nonetheless decided to make a good silly science fiction movie (yes, I am paraphrasing Robin Williams in The Birdcage, here). Nielsen brings a lot of humanity and smarts to all the pictures very strange scenes, and he even gives a sense of real desperation in some of them.

5.) The Doc

Warren Stevens is especially good as “Doc” Ostrow, the ship’s physician. He’s obviously smarter than Adams but he doesn’t make a point of it. In keeping with this mild-mannered sensibility, Stevens underplays the part so beautifully that the film wouldn’t be half-as-good without him. Also, it’s the Doc who first figures out the mystery of Altair IV and makes the ultimate sacrifice to save his boss.

If Leslie Nielsen anticipates Captain Kirk by ten years, the Stevens anticipates both Bones and Spock, rolled into one.

6.) The Krell

Late in Act II, we learn that underneath Morbius’s ranch house lies the last remaining structure of the Krell, the ancient alien people who once occupied Altair IV. I love how we never actually see the Krell—our imaginations can render them much more vividly than any guy in a rubber suit could. And their strangeness is alluded in many subtle ways—the squat, triangular shape of their passageways, and their creepy, John-Cage-like music (which Morbius has a recording of), and, most of all, in the cold magnificence of their underground power plant (again, rendered with amazing effectiveness with matte artistry).

I also love the basic premise of the movie, that the Krell were once a great, benevolent civilization who destroyed themselves due to a fatal lack of self-awareness.  In short, the Krell began to believe their own myths about themselves. Sound familiar, America?

7.) Shakespeare

Many people have observed that the plot closely parallels that of Shakespeare’s The Tempest.  In that play, a reclusive magician, Prospero, lives alone with his daughter on a deserted island, with only a brutish servant (Caliban) and an unreliable sprite (Ariel) for company. Much like Morbius in Forbidden Planet, Prospero has left a corrupt human civilization for the peaceful isolation of his magic island—only to see that peace shattered when a ship crashes ashore.

Does it matter whether you not you recognize Morbius, Alta, and Robbie as thinly veiled sci-fi versions of Prospero, Miranda, and Ariel?  No. Not a bit. It is cool, though.

8.) Walter Pidgeon

With his great, stentorian voice and Biblical demeanor, Walter Pidgeon is great in the Morbius role. Like Prospero in The Tempest, Morbius is a good man who feels betrayed by humanity. He prefers the life of the mind, studying the art and science of the noble, extinct Krell civilization. But the lack of self-awareness that destroyed the Krell is mirrored in Morbius himself; he thinks that he’s a man of pure intellect. He’s totally oblivious to the secret rage boiling deep down in his subconscious (not to mention a dark sexual interest in his daughter).

Morbius resembles another literary archetype even more than Prospero: Dr. Jeckyl. He’s a man who, by refusing to acknowledge that he has a dark side, is guaranteed to lose control of it.  Which brings me to…

9.) The Monster

The mysterious monster of Altair IV remains unseen for most of the picture.  But, as with the Krell, we get clues of its true nature. These include the plaster cast of its footprint that Doc makes, revealing the monster’s horrific, nightmarish strangeness.  The clues are, of course, more effective and scary than any on-screen reveal could possibly be.

And yet, when the reveal finally comes, it’s pretty darned effective.  Like so many creatures of mythology, the monster only becomes visible when caught in a fluid—in this case, the laser crossfire of Adam’s crew. Thus the monster is revealed as a huge, roaring, chimera (brilliantly animated by Disney artist Joshua Meador, on-loan to MGM). It’s a fusion-powered demon of pure rage.

10.) Robbie the Robot

Robbie, Morbius’s robot butler, is tied with Doc Ostrow as the most moral and decent character. The movie implies that he has been programmed with something akin to Asimov’s 3 Laws of Robotics, which forbid him from hurting a human being.  And, as in so many Asimov stories, he is placed in a deadly logic loop by his human master.

In short, Robbie is a good guy in an impossible situation.  Kind of like the rest of the characters.

Robbie later became an annoying, kiddie-friendly prop on the TV shows such as Lost in Space and The Twillight Zone, but he must have seen pretty cool back in the 1956.  Not only is he incredibly strong, loyal, and smart, he is also a walking replicator, able to run off cocktail dresses and bottles of prime whisky with ease. And so, like Morbius’s house, Robby represents the boundless abundance of America in the 1950s, and also the utopian promise of technology.  I also love how he lives at the end.