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Year: 1956 Production: MGM Director: Fred McLeod Wilcox Starring: Walter Pidgeon, Anne Francis, Leslie Nielsen, Warren Srevens Screenwriter: Cyril Hume Based on a story by Irving Block and Allen Adler. Novelization (1956) by Philip MacDonald 98 minutes; Color
Although Wilcox was new to sf cinema (his best-known film was Lassie Come Home [1943]), Forbidden Planet is one of the most attractive movies in the genre. Some of the more interesting resonances of Forbidden Planet stem from its being an updated version of Shakespeare's The Tempest (circa 1611). Prospero is Morbius, an obsessive scientist living alone with his daughter Altaira (the virginal Miranda figure) on the planet Altair IV. Ariel is a charming metal creature, Robby the Robot (who became so popular - the first robot star since Metropolis - that another film, The Invisible Boy [1957], was made as a special vehicle for him). The film opens with a spaceship landing to investigate the fate of a colony whose sole survivors are Morbius and Altaira. The crew is menaced by an invisible Caliban, which proves to be a "Monster from the Id" and eventually destroys its unwitting creator, Morbius; holocaust follows. Altaira is saved. The plot, mixing the tawdry and the potent, is very sophisticated for the time, astonishingly so for a film designed for a juvenile audience, especially in the intimations of incestuous feelings of the father for the daughter. The dialogue is slick and unmemorable. The best sequences involve a tour of the still-functioning artifacts, spectacular and mysterious, dwarfing the humans passing among them, of an awesomely powerful vanished race, the Krel. The visual treatment of Forbidden Planet was unsurpassed until 2001: A Space Odyssey, made 12 years later. Despite its flaws, it remains one of the few masterpieces of sf cinema. |
| The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction |