Our theme for the month is exploration, and this week we’re going to have some fun and take a look at one of my all-time favourite movies, Forbidden Planet.
Forbidden Planet (1956) was a ground-breaking science fiction movie in many ways. The script had a great pedigree – it was loosely based on The Tempest by William Shakespeare. The movie introduced Robby the Robot, who became a fixture in numerous other science fiction productions subsequently. And it had an entirely electronic music score, which created a remarkably effective ambience to the story of space explorers investigating a distant Earth colony that hasn’t been heard from for quite some time.
Why do so many of us love science fiction? I believe it’s because the genre allows our imaginations the kind of free reign that they had when we were children and anything seemed possible. I remember concocting all kinds of scenarios for my friends and I to play with as a child, but inexorably as we get older we’re expected to learn to behave like adults.
My favourite annual holiday, Halloween, is a case in point: there’s a certain age beyond which kids are expected to stop participating in trick-or-treating. For a long time after I reached adulthood no one even discussed Halloween during the main part of the year – but, I’m delighted to say, rebellious adults have chosen to embrace their imaginations and inner children year-round, a thumb in the eye of those who feel maturity is the be-all and end-all of existence.
Psychologists in recent years have all banded together to emphasize the need for play, especially for adults. And what else is science fiction than letting our minds out to play, to speculate all kinds of ‘what if’ scenarios?
What if, for example, future travellers were to land on a planet where the long-deceased civilization had become almost god-like technologically, but still hadn’t excised psychological flaws? How would our intrepid explorers handle any knowledge that they were able to glean from the cultural remnants? Would they succeed where the society that was thousands of years more advanced had failed, or would they fall into the same trap?
That’s the question that Forbidden Planet poses.
Science fiction, more loosely called ‘speculative’ fiction, has apparently been around since ancient times. Some scholars point to legendary tales like the Mesopotamian story The Epic of Gilgamesh as early science fiction, and perhaps they’re right, but there was still an element of religion and belief in those stories. However, there was a story written in ancient Greece that can only be read as deliberate science fiction. It was titled, ironically, A True Story, and was written around the year 2 CE (AD) by Lucian of Samosata, as a poke at all the fantastic legends prevalent at the time.
Lucian really let fly with his imagination while he advised that everything in the story was total baloney. In it, he and a group of fellow travellers got blown off course by a storm, found an island with women-shaped trees and got carried to the moon by a whirlwind. There they got mixed up in a war, then returned to earth only to get swallowed by an enormous whale full of fish people that they had to battle, and much more. It’s the sort of pulp plotting we’d expect to find in Edgar Rice Burroughs’ tales of John Carter’s exploits on Mars (published 1912-1943), not in Classical Greece, but there it was.
Over the centuries numerous writers engaged in speculative fiction, generally more fantasy than science, but there seemed to be an enduring fascination with the orb that dominates our night sky in all its phases.
However, the biggest sci-fi breakthrough came with a medical theme, with Mary Shelley’s extraordinary Frankenstein in 1818. Following that, Edgar Allan Poe wrote several stories that contained sci-fi elements; Jules Vernes took up the mantle with lots of detail and scientific accuracy; and H.G. Wells lifted the genre to a new level with a wide variety of scenarios, from a man who becomes invisible with one of his scientific concoctions, to a man who travels millennia into the future with a time machine, and invading Martians who wage war on our planet.
Science fiction began to enter the mainstream in America with the advent of pulp magazines, starting with Amazing Stories in 1926, followed by Weird Tales, Astounding Stories and Wonder Stories. The covers were replete with evocative images that provoked and tantalized.
When Radio and Hollywood got in on the action, the universe became the limit. In 1938, a brilliant young producer/actor named Orson Welles created a radio production of H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds that scared quite a few listeners and made history.
Early sci-fi movies replicated all the classic sci-fi novels, but eventually took off with inspired ideas of their own, often influenced by what was happening in the news. After the incident at Roswell, New Mexico in 1947, movies featuring aliens became hugely popular. Sometimes the aliens were evil and predatory (The Thing from Another World 1951), sometimes wiser than us and bearing warnings (The Day the Earth Stood Still 1951). The advent of nuclear power created a lot of anxiety in the world, which manifested with all kinds of cautionary tales, especially the massive 1953 hit The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms about a dinosaur that had been frozen under the waters of the Arctic until nuclear testing thawed it out and sent it on a grumpy rampage.
The financial success of these movies led some Hollywood producers down a different path – cheaply-made movies that still enthralled audiences in the theatre – and the sci-fi “B-movie” was born. Most notorious was Ed Wood’s Plan 9 from Outer Space (1957), complete with pie-plate flying saucers and some of the silliest dialogue in movie history (“This man’s been murdered, and someone’s responsible!”). It’s a must-see just for its place in the canon of worst movies ever.
In the latter part of the 1950s, though, the ongoing success of the sci-fi genre in movies led to some tries at making more serious films, and one of them was Forbidden Planet.
Writing science fiction is a lot of fun, but it also has its challenges. It takes us into a world that’s an extension of our own, only different in some way – perhaps the future, either better (the Star Trek series) or worse (e.g. Blade Runner); perhaps the present with an unexpected development (e.g. one of the best sci-fi movies ever, IMHO: The Andromeda Strain, 1971); perhaps an alternate reality unknown to the average person (the Men in Black movies)… This means that the premise must conform to some known scientific principles and theories, both to make the story relatable to readers/viewers, and to give it some plausibility. Fantasy novels/movies can get away with far more departures from reality because they deal with magic, not science.
And even the most fascinating concept is nothing without characters who have goals and face conflict as they work through whatever problem the story has posed for them. Great sci-fi resonates because it stems from real-world issues. What made many episodes of the original Star Trek series so brilliant was their exploration of 1960s societal issues like racism that would never have been allowed in normal programming (check out Season 3 Episode 15, Let That Be Your Last Battlefield, where two aliens come on board, both dichromatic but on opposite sides of their bodies, who consider themselves so different that the other shouldn’t be allowed to live).
When Forbidden Planet was in development, it was originally supposed to be a cheaper film to be pitched to one of the B-movie studios. However, the team working on it, Irving Block and Allen Adler, decided to offer it to MGM. As part of their pitch, they had to act out the story, including some of the special effects, and were quite surprised when the studio bought it and gave it a big budget. The screenwriter they hired, a novelist named Cyril Hume, came up with a script with much more depth than a lot of the sci-fi movies of the time. MGM insisted on some comedic scenes, which some reviewers think were unfortunate, but I feel they actually add to the realism of the plot (if perhaps a little cheesy) – our lives are always mixed with humour as well as drama.
Two years of research went into the movie to provide scientific accuracy – at least as much as was available at the time. The writers still had to come up with a way to explain super-fast travel across the galaxy – pay attention as you watch the movie to find out what.
The movie begins with a crew from Earth, who’ve been in space for 14 months, arriving at the planet Altair-4 to find out what happened to an expedition from 20 years previously that was never heard from again. As they approach the planet, they’re greeted from the surface by Dr. Morbius, who warns them not to land. Determined to carry out their mission, they land regardless, and quickly find out what monstrous entity has been terrorizing the planet – and why Morbius and his daughter have survived.
So, given the lack of CGI (computer-generated imagery), how to convincingly create an alien planet? The film was shot inside MGM studios for the most part, using a gorgeous 10,000-foot circular painting as a backdrop. What I love about the movie is that it created a world similar enough to Earth to be fathomable, but fascinatingly alien, through the use of the painting (the jade-green planetary sky is surprisingly beautiful, and the cliff-shrouded area where the spaceship lands is strangely ominous) and other effects.
Two experimental composers, Louis and Bebe Barron, were brought on board to provide the score, which was composed entirely of electronic sounds – not too weird, just enough to add a certain eerie ‘otherness’.
The scenes where Dr. Morbius takes the crew’s captain, played by Leslie Nielsen, and the ship’s doctor, on a tube-shaped shuttle to the ancient power plant of the Krell (the transcendent race that created such a magnificently-advanced civilization while humans were still trying to stand upright) are visually stunning. Scenes where massive glowing generators stretching for miles and diving deep inside the planet, endlessly producing vast amounts of power even though their builders had died out 200,000 years before, are one of the reasons why the movie received an Academy Award nomination for Best Special Effects.
Well, that’s enough of a teaser – time to watch! Apart from waiting Forbidden Planet to run on Turner Classic Movies (or a sci-fi themed channel), you can rent or buy it on Amazon Prime Video, Apple TV and Google Play Movies.
The movie’s style has been a great influence on science fiction ever since. MGM kept the Earth crew’s flying saucer-style space cruiser prop and later used it in a number of productions on the MGM lot, including an episode of The Twilight Zone. Gene Roddenberry, producer of Star Trek, cited the film as a major inspiration for his own space opera series.
Today it still earns high ratings – Rotten Tomatoes gives it 96% on its Tomatometer.
So turn off the lights, make yourself some popcorn (or something a little more ‘space-y’), watch TCM’s Ben Mankiewicz’s introduction to the movie, and settle in for a wonderful Golden-Age of sci-fi treat!
