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Forbidden Planet is a 1956 science fiction film and a subsequent novelization by W.J. Stuart. The film features a number of Oscar-nominated special effects, groundbreaking use of an all-electronic music score, and the first screen appearance of both the famous Robby the Robot [2] and the famous C-57D flying saucer starship. The film's characters and setting were inspired by Shakespeare's The Tempest,[1] though the plot is very different. Also notable is its very effective execution and use of well designed sets, flats, props, matte paintings and sound stage scenic paintings. The production was supervised by Dore Schary, the film's uncredited executive producer.
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Plot
In the early 2200s, the United Planets Cruiser C-57D is sent to the planet Altair IV in the Altair star system, sixteen light-years from Earth, to find out what happened to the Bellerophon expedition, sent out some twenty years earlier. As their spaceship arrives after a year's voyage, the crew detects an immense power source scanning the ship (see image of spaceship below).
They are immediately contacted over the ship's transmitter by Dr. Edward Morbius, the expedition's philologist, who warns them to leave, but refuses to provide a reason. Upon landing, they are met by Robby the Robot, who takes the Commander, his First Officer and Medical Officer to Morbius' home. Morbius explains that a year after the expedition's arrival, some unknown force wiped out nearly everyone in his party and vaporized the Bellerophon as the final survivors tried to take off. Only he, his wife (who later died of natural causes) and infant daughter survived.
Morbius fears that the same fate may await the crew of the C-57D. He and his daughter have remained unharmed, and his house has an interesting array of unknown advanced technology, including Robby, which he claims to have "tinkered ... together during my first months up here" (with Robby exhibiting advances in technology beyond that currently known), including a home security system which can quickly cover the residence window-slides with steel plates.
The C-57D command crew meet Morbius' daughter Altaira, who is now nineteen years old and has grown up, like Shakespeare's Miranda, not knowing any male except her father. She swims in the nude (she does not know what a bathing suit is), wears scanty clothing and is very curious about human relations. The commander is very protective of her but nonetheless competes with his First Officer, Jerry Farman, for the chance to enlighten her on the romantic topics (note discussion in scene at left).
Morbius tells the Commander he has been reconstructing the history of the Krell, the long-extinct natives of the planet. They had possessed a technology far in advance of that of the humans, but had all died 200,000 years before in one mysterious night of destruction. The crew are shown an intact and self-maintaining underground Krell laboratory, dubbed a "nursery", which includes a "plastic educator" brain-booster machine that resulted in the death of the captain of the Bellerophon. Morbius explains that his attempts to use the educator put him into a coma for almost two days, but also resulted in a significantly increased IQ, enabling him to build Robby the Robot and other inventions.
The party then leave the Krell lab and are taken on a tour of the Krell facilities. This includes an underground machine in the shape of a cube 20 miles square, powered by 9200 thermonuclear reactors, which has been operating, self-repairing and self-maintaining, its purpose unknown, since the extinction of the Krell. The sweeping semi-animated effects shots convey images of enormous, miles-deep shafts with huge structures moving up and down, transferring powerful arcs of energy. Power meters indicate the tremendous energy this vast machine could generate, each meter representing ten times the power of the previous one. Most of the meters are blank, and only one of them indicates any energy usage. The visitors ask Morbius the purpose of the machine, and he is evasive, mentioning only that the machine responds to flocks of birds with energy discharges (apparently it was a beam from the machine which had earlier scanned the arrival ship).
Image:Forbidden Planet 2.jpg
Site of C-57D spaceship on Altair IV, with crew working on weaponry and circuits, where unknown creature attacked.
One night, an unknown creature sneaks into the ship and kills Chief Engineer Quinn, tearing his body apart in the process. (This is not seen, but is merely reported.) In response to his killing, security around the ship is increased including the installation of particle cannons and a defensive force-field fence. A plaster cast is made from one of the invisible attacker's footprints. Dr. Ostrow puzzles over the improbability of such a creature, which appears to be a chimera which doesn't follow any known evolutionary adaptation — in his description, a "monster".
The intruder returns to the ship the following night, and is found to be invisible. It remains invisible until revealed by special effects: a huge, roaring, leonine biped revealed in outline by the energy neutron-particle-beam guns that flicker over its surface. In the attack, it kills First Officer Lt. Jerry Farman, Science Officer Pete Doherty and Gunner's Mate "Buddha" Ellis. In the Krell lab, various power meters come to life as the attack progresses. Morbius, having a nightmare, is awakened by Altaira, also screaming, apparently also from a nightmare. Simultaneously, the invisible attacker vanishes and the Krell power meters rapidly fall back to near zero.
Ostrow idly mentions that for the creature to have survived the high energy beams of the cannons it would have to be so dense that it would sink of its own mass to the center of the planet. The only other explanation is presented as a literal recreation of the creature 'microsecond by microsecond'.
Commander Adams and Doc Ostrow go to Morbius' home to confront him about their latest findings. Ostrow sneaks in and attempts to use the Krell educator machine. Before he dies from its effects, he gasps out his revelation: the huge machine was designed to let the Krell materialize anything they wanted at a mere thought. "But the Krell forgot one thing! Monsters, John! Monsters from the id!" Though the Krell considered themselves civilized, their subconscious minds were unleashed by the almost limitless power of the Machine. With this information, the Commander deduces that the race was wiped out in a single night of frenzied destruction, as their subconscious minds acted out their darkest urges, fueled by the Machine's power.
With this revelation, the Commander also realizes that Morbius' sessions with the educator had attuned his mind to the machinery. Although Morbius' conscious mind was not strong enough to control the machine, his subconscious was and did, directing the attacks first against the Bellerophon party when they voted to return to Earth, and now the rescue ship. His deepest desire is simply to be left alone to study the Krell, and his subconscious is using the Machine to fulfill that wish. Ultimately, Altaira declares her love for the commander and chooses to leave the planet with him, despite the risks posed by this defiance of her father.
In the climactic attack, the monster breaks into the Krell nursery to which the remaining principals have fled. Morbius, finally accepting the awful truth that the enemy is his own subconscious, throws himself between the monster and his daughter. He is mortally injured, suffering a severe cerebral hemorrhage, and simultaneously the monster disappears. As he lies dying of the stroke, he directs Adams to put the Krell machine into overload to initiate the destruction of the planet. He has realized that the machine is far too dangerous to be used by any race that cannot fully control its subconscious desires. Altaira, Robbie, and the surviving crew members escape to a safe distance where they witness the destruction of the planet, and then prepare for the trip to Earth.
Cast
Crewmen:
and introducing: Robby the Robot*
* Billed in opening credits, but not closing credits. Billed as The Robot in theatrical trailer.
† Not credited on-screen.
Production
A small portion of the Great Machine on Altair IV (note the characters walking on the platform)
The original 1952 screen treatment was titled "Fatal Planet" by Irving Block and Allen Adler; the screenplay by Cyril Hume was retitled "Forbidden Planet" which was felt to have more box-office appeal[3].
Block and Adler's treatment took place in the year 1976 on the planet Mercury. An expedition headed by John Grant is sent to the planet to retrieve Dr. Adams and his daughter Dorianne who have been stranded there for twenty years. The plot is roughly the same as the final film, though Grant is able to rescue both Adams and his daughter and escape the invisible monster stalking them.
Many aspects of the film production involved novel concepts at the time. The film sets were constructed at an MGM soundstage on the Culver City lot and were designed by Cedric Gibbons & Arthur Longeran:
- For modern viewers, some of the advanced technologies featured on the saucer-design starship are interesting, both in their relationship to how human technology has actually developed, and in terms of their influence on later science fiction. In this film, "quantum mechanic" is a job description. The starship has a "quanto-gravitetic Q-G hyper-drive" system that allows travel over the 16 light year journey distance in about a year. The crew must place themselves in "DC Stations" (Deceleration tubes) as the ship comes out of hyperspace — a form of stasis in order to avoid injury or death from such braking forces.
- This was the first film in which humans constructed flying saucers and used them to travel in outer space.
- The film, produced just thirteen years before the first manned Moon landing, begins with a short history of space exploration. The first manned landing on the Moon (with both male and female astronauts) in the 2090's, visiting all the solar planets by the end of the 22nd century and the first faster than light travel in the early 23rd century allowing colonisation.
- Helen Rose, who had made some miniskirts for actress Anne Francis, is sometimes credited with inventing the garment.
- For the film, a full-size mockup of three quarters of the C-57D was built to suggest its full width of 170 ft (51 meters). This was surrounded by a huge painted diorama of the desert landscape of Altair 4. This set took up all the space in an MGM soundstage on the Culver City lot. The entire film was studio-bound, without any outdoor photography. All outdoor scenes were simulated with sets and visual effects. Also constructed was a futuristic electrically-controlled Landcar sports vehicle or "dune buggy" piloted by Robby, and a futuristic Tractor-Tow Truck offloaded from the spaceship as a land vehicle.
- Robby the Robot was possibly the most expensive film prop ever constructed at the time ($125,000);[4] he also featured in the film The Invisible Boy. He also appeared in numerous television series and movies.
- The adamantine steel of the Krell which was used by Morbius to create protection for his residence shares a common etymological origin with the fictional metal adamantium, although the word "adamantine" itself is from an old word for "of diamond" or "diamond-like" and in modern mineralogy denotes a form of the gem corundum.
- Forbidden Planet was first released on April 1, 1956 in theaters across America, and it ran continuously at the Grauman's Chinese Theater in Hollywood until the following September. Its Hollywood premiere was at the Grauman’s Chinese on Hollywood Boulevard, and featured Robby the Robot on display in the lobby. The film was subsequently re-released in movie theaters in 1972 as one of MGM's "Kiddie Matinee" features, with 6 minutes of film footage cut to ensure a G-Rating from the Motion Picture Association of America.[citation needed] The classic sci-fi epic was first released on MGM VHS and Beta Video in 1982, and it was reissued by MGM/UA in widescreen VHS for its 40th Anniversary in 1996. FP was then released on DVD in 1999 by Warner Bros., catalogue number 65059, after MGM's back catalog was sold to AOL-TW by Turner Entertainment and MGM/UA in 1998. The 1999 release came with both standard and widescreen format visuals and English, French and Spanish soundtrack and subtitle options. This was followed by a release of the 50th Anniversary and the Ultimate Collector's Edition DVDs in November 2006. [5]
- The animated sequences used for the special effects (especially the attack of the Id Monster) were animated by veteran FX animator, Joshua Meador who was lent to MGM from Walt Disney Pictures for the film. Curiously, shots showing the shape of the invisible Id Monster outlined in the blaster beams were evidently removed from some prints shown on TV — presumably because its monstrous appearance was considered too terrifying for younger viewers — and it was many years before these shots were restored. The Id Monster vaguely resembles the Looney Tunes character "Gossamer". A close look at the Id Monster shows it to have a small goatee beard, suggesting that it is the product of the deep psychology of Dr. Morbius, the only other figure in the movie with this feature.
- After the movie was released, there followed a novelization by W.J. Stuart. The book delves further into the mystery of the vanished Krell, and Morbius's relationship to them. In the novel Morbius repeatedly exposes himself to the Krell mind machine, which (as suggested in the film) increases his brain power far beyond human intelligence. Unfortunately, Morbius retains enough of his imperfect human nature to be afflicted with hubris (his contempt for humanity is obvious). Not recognizing his own limitations is Morbius' downfall, as it had been for the Krell.
- Many of the props originally created for Forbidden Planet, including the ship, crew uniforms, and Robbie's transport vehicle, were later used in episodes of Rod Serling's The Twilight Zone television series, which was also filmed at the MGM studios.
Fifty years after the theatrical release, Forbidden Planet was released on HD DVD on 28th November 2006. In honour of its fiftieth anniversary, the film was restored by the Warner Bros.-MGM reconstruction crew.[6]
The DVD cover shows a graphic sketch of the Captain and Altaira, with a background view of Robby the Robot (see image at right).
Precursors
The use of the name "Bellerophon" ties in with Morbius's character in several ways:
- The mythical Greek hero Bellerophon was struck down by the gods for the crime of hubris in trying to reach Olympian heights.
- One of Bellerophon's greatest feats was his victory over the Chimera, a monster with mismatched body parts appropriate to many other animals. When the ship's doctor tries to reconstruct the Monster from the Id based on a cast of its footprint, he is puzzled by its having attributes appropriate to many different and incompatible animals.
Morbius tells Adams and Farman to view the Krell thermonuclear reactions only in the mirror: "Man does not behold the face of the Gorgon and live."
While not stated explicitly in the film, the novelization compared Altaira's ability to tame the tiger (until her sexual awakening) to the medieval myth of a unicorn being tamable only by a virgin woman.
As mentioned, the film was influenced by Shakespeare's The Tempest, though the plot of the film only superficially resembles the plot of the play. Some of the characters can more clearly be opposed:
Robby the Robot can be identified with Caliban -- he's clumsy; he does the housework and in a humorous scene similar to Act II scene II of The Tempest, he provides alcohol and gets intoxicated with the ship's cook; "This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine," Prospero says in The Tempest. The "monsters from the Id" represent the spirits, in addition to Ariel, who were invisible and controlled by Prospero. Alternately, most critical sources (see The Tempest) have identified the libidinous Caliban with the Id Monster, and the sexless Robby with Ariel, despite Robby's corporality. This is probably because Robby is entirely in Morbius' control, and because Robby, like Ariel, cannot be used to do harmful acts, going into lockup in somewhat the same way as Ariel when commanded to do "abhorred" acts by the witch Sycorax. Robby acts in accordance with Isaac Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics, and is unable even to act against the Id Monster, which actually would require the killing of Morbius.
The title of the film surely alludes to forbidden fruit, as some critics have noted,[7] reminding us that The Tempest itself is a version of the "Eden lost" story, in which isolated islands seem Brave New Worlds full of innocent people and different kinds of Serpents. Altaira, with her garden of tame animals and her ignorance of the meaning of nakedness, represents the innocence which is soon to be brought down by the forbidden fruit of knowledge, here represented both by the starship full of ordinary men, and by the re-awakening of the slumbering technologies of the Krell.
Unlike Prospero, the wizardly character Dr. Morbius is not in full command of the magic of the technology he discovers, and like the Krell he is ultimately destroyed by the combination of power and what Commander Adams calls "the secret devil of every soul on the planet." As the loser in a pact with technology and hidden desires, Dr. Morbius has something in common with Dr. Faustus, and this film of the post-atomic age also is keeping with the warnings of the Faust mythos.
Forbidden Planet follows Aristotle's rules for tragedy. A great man is brought down by a single "tragic flaw" or error of judgment — his belief in his moral superiority, which supposedly follows his intellectual superiority. The same flaw destroyed the "noble Krell" as well. And, as Aristotle preferred, the story takes place over many years (in this case, twenty), yet is told almost entirely through exposition.
Soundtrack
- The movie's innovative electronic music score (credited as "Electronic tonalities" partly to avoid having to pay movie industry music guild fees) was composed by Louis and Bebe Barron. Their score is widely credited with being the first completely electronic film score, and helped open the door for electronic music in film. The synthesized sounds of "bleeps, blurps, whirs, whines, throbs, hums and screeches" that make up the sound track contained carefully developed themes and motifs, while supporting the general atmosphere of the various scenes.[4]
- Using the equations presented in the 1948 book, Cybernetics: Or, Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine by mathematician Norbert Wiener, Louis Barron constructed the electronic circuits which he used to generate sounds. Most of the tonalities were generated using a circuit called a ring modulator. After recording the base sounds, Louis and Bebe Barron further manipulated the material by adding effects, such as reverb and delay, and reversing or changing the speed of certain sounds.[8]
- The soundtrack for Forbidden Planet preceded the Moog synthesizer of 1964 by almost a decade.
- As Louis and Bebe Barron did not belong to the Musicians' Union, their work was not considered for an Academy Award – either in the soundtrack category nor in the special effects category. Curiously, MGM avoided releasing a soundtrack album when the film was first released. However, film composer-conductor David Rose released a 45-rpm single of his original main title theme for Forbidden Planet, which he had recorded at MGM Studios in Culver City, California in March 1956. This theme was the unused discarded theme since David Rose had originally been contracted to compose the film’s music score in 1955, but was discharged from his assignment between Christmas 1955 and New Year’s by MGM producer Dore Schary, who discovered the Barrons quite by chance at a beatnik nightclub in Greenwich Village, New York while on a family Christmas visit to NYC. Schary hired Louis & Bebe Barron on the spot, and contracted with them to do the film music score, the first electronic music (excepting the theremin) ever heard on a theater screen.
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