Sci-fi films remain popular right up to this very age when geekdom is considered cool. The genre has progressed from the campy B-movies of the 1950s to the sprawling, intellectual blockbusters we know and love today. One film from the bygone era that continues to impress new generations of sci-fi fans is, without a doubt, Forbidden Planet.
The 1956 film was a paradigm shift compared to the sci-fi offerings that came out during the same decade. It boasted a much more mature storyline than its peers, while introducing several key elements that made it way ahead of its time. Not only did this make the film a roaring success, but it also paved the way for future generations to expand on its formula and create gripping, tense sci-fi hits.
The Acting
The cast of Forbidden Planet is excellent, and led by the two main characters played by Naked Gun funnyman Leslie Nielsen and Walter Pidgeon, who played Dr. Edward Morbius. There's little comedy to be found in this film, however. It's a straight-laced thriller that tosses the B-movie formula out the window completely.
It's odd to see Nielsen in a serious role, particularly as the commander of a spaceship, but he pulls it off with flair and sophistication. Similarly, Pidgeon's performance as Dr. Morbius is top-notch, as is the ing cast including Anne Francis, Warren Stevens, and Jack Kelly.
The Audio
Forbidden Planet is one of the few sci-fi films that completely ignored a bombastic John Williams-style musical score in favor of an abstract electronic sound palette. While many filmmakers would have easily opted for big, booming orchestral numbers, Bebe and Louis Barron instead created a soundtrack that focused heavily on tension and creepiness.
As such, there's no "music" to hear in the film; merely a series of hypnotic electronic beeps, bops, and soundwaves that fit the alien nature of the planet in question. It's also highly effective during scenes meant to terrify the audience, including the monster attack, and the final act where Dr. Morbius' subconscious rages out of control.
The Special Effects
While many 1950s sci-fi films were content to put men in rubber suit monster getups and dangle spaceships from piano wire, Forbidden Planet went a step beyond. Matte paintings, visual effects, and detailed full-size sets were just a few of the techniques used to bring the story to life on a grand scale.
By today's standards, it's positively primitive, but Forbidden Planet challenged everyone that followed to step up their game. It was this kind of foresight that would lead to major technical developments moving forward, particularly 12 years later when Stanley Kubrick released the breathtaking 2001: A Space Odyssey, and later George Lucas's Star Wars in 1977.
The Technical Jargon
Forbidden Planet was surprisingly technical for a film made in the 1950s. It didn't seek to insult the viewer's intelligence by dumbing down the lingo, whether they understood it or not. This gave the film a much-needed believability boost, even if the concept of mankind traveling through space in a flying saucer seemed silly.
This would no doubt have a dramatic influence on the sci-fi works that followed, most notably Gene Roddenberry's Star Trek television series that debuted on TV eight years after the film was released. It was the start of geek-talk slowly seeping into mainstream culture, and becoming part of its lexicon.
The Scope & Scale
One can tell that Forbidden Planet wanted to look big, ambitious, and realistic for its audience, and it pulled out all the stops to make it happen. Although the crux of the story is very small in scale, the elements used to tell it are nothing short of grandiose. Nowhere is this demonstrated more clearly than when Dr. Morbius gives his visitors a tour of the ancient Krell under-city.
This scene is absolutely breathtaking, both from a creative standpoint, and its overall scale. The sets and shots are massive, with a scope that easily dwarfed other films of the time, and even some to this very day. Respect should be given for the sheer amount of technicality and vision that went into the film's production.
The Approach
At first glance, Forbidden Planet might appear to be nothing more than a story about a human crew touching down on an alien planet and encountering a guy in a rubber suit. In reality, it's far more complex than that. The film took a far different approach from its 1950s brethren in the fact that it wanted to be taken seriously.
The movie is juxtaposed between its visual scale, and its inward narrative. They're both strong elements that work together to tell the story, rather than clash outright. The spectacle and wonder of the planet Altair IV is flanked by the strong themes of the story, all of which are centered on the human mind.
The Tension
Every single facet of Forbidden Planet was meant to create and maintain a high level of tension that borders on the primordial. All the basic elements of pure fear are put to work, from the creepiness of the planet, to the abandoned Krell city, and even the aforementioned lack of a musical score.
The film cleverly builds that tension through slow-moving, nail-biting sequences that hint at something stalking the protagonists in the darkness. It doesn't let up until the final act of the film when the audience becomes fully aware of the kind of unstoppable force they're up against.
The Monster
The fearsome sci-fi monster in Forbidden Planet is not an alien intelligence, nor a primordial creature driven by instinct. Instead, it's an energy-based projection of one man's violent subconscious thoughts. The entity is given form by the Krell technology still operating thousands of years after the species died out.
With a near-limitless supply of energy to fuel it, the creature in question is virtually unstoppable, and that's a horrifying thought. The first attack the creature makes on the ship is spine-tingling, even by today's standards, but when the audience learns what it really is, the premise becomes even more horrifying.
The Escape
Forbidden Planet may not boast an adrenaline-pumping escape ending Aliens, but it's still quite a scene to behold. Once again, there are no men in rubber suits, nor is there a physical or tangible monster to be seen. Instead, it's the sheer will of Dr. Morbius' hateful subconscious given form by the Krell machinery tapped into his mind.
The inability to stop the creature by conventional methods is what cranks up the tension of the scene until the final moment when Morbius realizes the key to stopping the madness. From there, the crew escapes the planet, only to watch it explode from a safe distance light years away.
The Social Commentary
1950s sci-fi centered mostly around watered down concepts involving an alien invasion of some sort. As such, few films in the genre really wanted to push beyond their paper-thin narratives, but Forbidden Planet was different. It was a far more mature, serious, and intellectual film than the peers surrounding it.
This was one of the few films to take the vastness of deep space exploration and alien civilizations, and directly invert the story back into the human mind. In this film, the real monster is our own subconscious - the primal part of ourselves committed to violence, rage, and destruction, and what would happen if it were allowed to escape into the real world.
