FORBIDDEN PLANET by Fred M. Wilcox
January 9th, 2007 by Dan Schneider
By Dan Schneider of Cosmoetica:
When one thinks of 1950s science-fiction films, one thinks of the sort of schlocky black-and-white B-movies that were parodied on the old Mystery Science Theater 3000 television show. Yet, while there were a whole lot of films like Plan 9 From Outer Space and Robot Monster, the 1950s did have some very good, if not great, sci-fi movies such as The Day the Earth Stood Still, The Incredible Shrinking Man, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The War of the Worlds, and The Thing from Another World.
For its literacy and production values, the best of the bunch was undoubtedly MGM’s first big foray into A-level science fiction, Forbidden Planet, released in 1956.The 98-minute color film directed by Fred M. Wilcox featured state-of-the-art special effects and was endowed with Cyril Hume’s solid screenplay from a screen treatment called "Fatal Planet" by Irving Block and Allen Adler, who adapted sections of William Shakespeare’s The Tempest.
Upon its release, Forbidden Planet drew raves for its Oscar-nominated special effects, its electronic music score by Louis and Bebe Barron (though credited as Electronic Tonalities, to avoid music guild fees), vivid matte paintings — inspired by Chesley Bonestell — and the famed Monster of the Id (MOTI), which was animated by Joshua Meador, on loan from the Walt Disney studios.
Even more famous was the appearance of Robby the Robot. Later, he would appear in The Invisible Boy - included in this DVD as a bonus — as well as in several 1960s sci-fi TV shows, including The Twilight Zone, Night Gallery, and Lost in Space (with whose own robot he is often confused), plus a cameo appearance in the 1984 film Gremlins.
Forbidden Planet offers a simple but elegantly constructed tale filled with humorous asides that leaven the forced ‘love story’ aspect in the film.
In the 23rd Century, the United Planets Cruiser C-57D — a flying saucer led by Commander J.J. Adams (Leslie Nielsen, long before his Police Squad days), is en route to the planet Altair IV to investigate what happened to the crew of the Bellerophon, sent to that planet twenty years earlier. After a year’s journey, they encounter the lone survivor of the party, Doctor Edward Morbius (Walter Pidgeon), a philologist and Prospero stand-in; his gorgeous blonde daughter Altaira (Anne Francis), or Alta, the Miranda character in a pre-1960s miniskirt; and Robby the Robot, the domestic servant who is the Calibanian counterpart.
Morbius warns the crew of a mysterious force that killed the Bellerophon party in their first year, even though he was immune to it. After a midnight attack that kills one of the ship’s men, Adams confronts Dr. Morbius, who explains that below his home is a machine — 7800 levels high, and powered by 9200 nuclear reactors — the only remnant of the extinct Krel race, which perished 200,000 years earlier in a single night after a million years of high culture.
The Krels were on the verge of non-material existence when the calamity struck. Dr. Morbius shows Adams a Krel nursery, with a plastic educator machine that killed the Bellerophon’s captain. Dr. Morbius survived, but had his intellect doubled. In the machine, Morbius can project a hologram of Alta — a scene that clearly inspired a similar moment in Star Wars. With this knowledge, he built Robby.
In the meantime, Adams and his number two, Lt. Farman (Jack Kelly), vie for Alta’s affections. Adams wins.
After the MOTI attacks again, killing three more men, and the appearance of the "invisible" monster — still scarier than most of the film monsters of the last fifty years — Dr. Morbius wakes from a concomitant nightmare. Alta does the same — and hers is even more vivid than her father’s.
Adams and Lt. Ostrow (Warren Stevens) decide to return into the Krel nursery and have one of them boost their mind power. The doctor does, and discovers the secret of the MOTI before he dies. Adams realizes the MOTI comes from Morbius’ id, yet Morbius does not believe it, even though he accepts it as the reason for the Krel’s demise. Joined by Alta, who now loves Adams, they hide within the nursery, and a twenty-six inch thick Krel metal door, which earlier resisted the blaster gun’s blasts. Yet, the MOTI slowly but surely heats up the door, and Morbius accepts that it is his evil self at the door. He relinquishes it and perishes, thus killing the MOTI, but before doing so instructs Adams to self-destruct he planet. Twenty-four hours later the ship is in deep space as the planet explodes, and they head back to earth.
Yes, there are many logical errors, e.g., why Adams would destroy the planet with Morbius already dead and without knowing if his ship was ready to lift off. But these are minor gaps that are compensated for by the film’s often humorous scenes — such as when Cooky the cook (Earl Holliman) gets the sixty gallons of Kansas City bourbon he wants from Robby to help him cook (yeah!), or when Alta asks Robby to make her a new dress and the robot exasperates over another petty request, stating, ‘Sorry miss, I was giving myself an oil job.’
Forbidden Planet, as literate and well acted as it is, would not be such an iconic film without Robby the Robot, who can speak 188 languages, including dialects and sub-tongues. Robby steals every scene he’s in, whether telling Adams, who comments on the planet’s high oxygen content, that, ‘I rarely use it myself, sir. It promotes rust,’ or zapping a little monkey who tries to steal fruit from a bowl.
There are also some interesting antinomies regarding technology. As an example, Forbidden Planet opens with the claim that mankind did not reach the moon till the end of the 20th century — when it was just thirteen years later that it happened in reality; many of the ship’s devices run on clearly antiquated atomic energy, there are no wireless communicators, and many of the technologies are gobbledygook, such as the use of quanto-gravitetic drive to travel in hyperspace.
Even so, many of the other devices in the film seem plausible. Unlike the large industrial technology in later sci-fi films, the sleek simplistic designs of many of the ship’s devices mirrors the sleekness of technology getting smaller and better. The film also follows Isaac Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics, a bonus for sci-fi fans, as it has had an obvious influence on the Star Trek and Star Wars franchises.
The 50th Anniversary Edition DVD comes on two discs. Disc one has Forbidden Planet in a great new transfer. Included are seven science-fiction film trailers, an excerpt from the 1950s TV series "MGM Parade" with Walter Pigeon appearing with Robby, as well as Robby’s appearance in the "The Robot Client" episode of the Thin Man TV series (starring Peter Lawford and Phyllis Kirk) that originally aired on February 28, 1958. Unfortunately, there is no audio commentary for this terrific film — and that’s a major oversight.
Disc two has The Invisible Boy, a solid 1957 B movie that was Robby’s first post-Forbidden Planet appearance, and three documentaries:
- The hour-long Watch the Skies!: Science Fiction, the 1950s and Us, with appearances by current blockbuster sci-fi filmmakers George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, James Cameron, John Carpenter, and Ridley Scott. The fact that it was written and directed by Time magazine critic Richard Schickel explains many of its flaws and omissions and flaws, e.g., no mention of Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
- The making-of featurette, Amazing! Exploring The Far Reaches of Forbidden Planet, with Leslie Nielsen, Anne Francis, Richard Anderson — the ‘Scotty’ of the ship (the engineer, Chief Quinn, who can do the impossible; later on, Anderson was featured in The Six Million Dollar Man, as Oscar Goldman), Warren Stevens, and Earl Holliman providing reminiscences about the film. There are also special-effects experts, like Dennis Muren and Phil Tippett, who discuss things like the making of the MOTI’s invisible footprints.
- Robby The Robot: Engineering a Sci-Fi Icon, which documents the robot’s making and his life after Forbidden Planet.
Additionally, the disc offers deleted scenes and "lost" footage.
Whereas the Freudian and Shakespearean cocktail of Forbidden Planet is a great example of sci-fi filmmaking — if not of great overall filmmaking — the other film in the package, The Invisible Boy, a black-and-white production based on a short story by Edmund Cooper, is a cute little movie that has moments as silly as Robot Monster, but that also offers some intriguing concepts that predate later sci-fi classics like 2001: A Space Odyssey, Colossus: The Forbin Project, and The Terminator series.
Yet, like Robot Monster or Invaders from Mars, The Invisible Boy may all be the dream of the title character, for so much of it is propelled by a young boy’s boredom and fails to make any sense. The title is based upon the invisibility Robby accords to ten-year-old Timmy (Richard Eyer) to gain vengeance on a bully, whom the boy has cobbled together after being hypnotized and subliminally enhanced by a super computer that is bent on world control. This super computer was built by Timmy’s father (Philip Abbott), who works at a supposedly super-secret lab where his son can inexplicably roam around unhindered.
Apparently the film is set in the 1980s, for the supercomputer — the typical room-sized models of that era — has slyly encoded seven wrong answers over 29 years to somehow gain consciousness. But it would have to be conscious in order to plan such a thing, no? Then there are 1950s type scenes, in which Timmy’s dad longwindedly tells him that a computer would have to be larger than Jupiter to be as good as a human brain, or when he looks at his wife while explaining that being a man — rather than a boy — has its ‘compensations.’
Yet, no one notices or cares that Timmy has built Robby, supposedly from plans that were brought back in time by a mad scientist who had traveled to the future (and this is all treated with a shrug by the scientists) when the United Planets Cruiser C-57D returned home with Robby from Altair IV. The dim parents even believe Timmy’s invisibility is just a phase devised to ‘get attention.’
Eventually, the computer enthralls military men — by having the clumsy Robby somehow kidnap and surgically implant vacuum tubes into them. Robby also kidnaps Timmy into outer space, apparently by being able to teleport himself past an army barrage to the base of the rocketship (why not teleport himself right into the ship?), where he will help put the computer that will enslave the world.
Timmy’s sexy mom (Diane Brewster) chides him, ‘Timmy, if you don’t bring that rocketship back this instant, you’ll get the spanking of your life.’ Yet, despite the computer’s rewriting of Robby’s program to not hurt sentient beings, Robby cannot pull out Timmy’s eyes when the computer commands him. The plan is foiled. The next day, Timmy and his dad try to disconnect the computer, but it appeals to the dad’s ego, hypnotizes both of them with its blinking ‘pretty lights’. It’s up to Robby to walk through a doorway filled with lights that feed the computer, thus killing it.
All in all, it’s a technically good film, especially with some rear projections and matte paintings. As for the absurdity of the adult reactions to Timmy’s and Robby’s exploits, it borders an Dalian surreal absurdity. Even so, it’s clear that the filmmakers had no sense of the sublime absurdity the film conjures, for it’s played straight, thus making it even funnier.
And as for the main feature? Well, Forbidden Planet deserves all its kudos. It’s not a perfect film, but it’s a great way to spend a couple of hours. It is also far better than Star Wars, which though made twenty years later seems much more outdated and juvenile. Only films such as 2001: A Space Odyssey, Solaris, Alien, and Aliens, and the first two Terminators, have really equaled or surpassed this classic in depth and effects.
It’s worth knowing that, despite Forbidden Planet’s ‘happy ending,’ there is the possibility that the MOTI is still dormant within Alta, as well. After all, she is her father’s daughter, and had an even more vivid nightmare than her father when the MOTI attacked the ship a second time. Also, the film wisely only ’shows’ the MOTI once, and never shows the Krel, for the imagination can always conjure greater scares than the best special effects. Additionally, Forbidden Planet makes good use of narrative ellipses to condense the tale, something that far more realistic art films often fail to do.
Unlike other sci-fi films that are rather obvious Cold War allegories, Forbidden Planet is one of those rare films that both defines and transcends its era. Watch it and you will agree — though you’ll sleep a little less easily afterwards.
© Dan Schneider
Forbidden Planet (1956). Director: Fred M. Wilcox. Screenplay: Cyril Hume, from a story by Irving Block and Allen Adler. Cast: Walter Pidgeon, Anne Francis, Leslie Nielsen.
Writer, critic, and poet Dan Schneider is the editor of Cosmoetica, which he describes as “the most popular non-commercial literary site online.”
Other reviews by Dan Schneider can be found at Cinemension, Cosmoetica’s “film division.”
Note: The views expressed in this article are those of Mr. Schneider, and they may not reflect the views of the Alternative Film Guide.
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One Response to “FORBIDDEN PLANET by Fred M. Wilcox”
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It’s obvious that Dan Schneider doesn’t understand the main principle of the ‘Monster From The Id’ when he states in his review:
“It’s worth knowing that, despite Forbidden Planet’s ‘happy ending,’ there is the possibility that the MOTI is still dormant within Alta, as well. After all, she is her father’s daughter…”
The MOTI is not the Id. The MOTI is the product of what the Krell Machine does WITH the Id.
According to the Freudian model, everyone has an Id.
Without the Krell Machine, these can be no MOTI.
Do your homework, Dan. Otherwise, good writing.