The One That Started It All

If you’ve never seen it, then I envy you; you can look forward to seeing the film Forbidden Planet for the very first time. I recently acquired this classic masterpiece on DVD and screened it for my family.  It’s been decades since I last saw it, and my more mature perspective made me appreciate it even more.

Here are some facts to put things in perspective:  When this film was made in 1955 (released in ’56) it was only 10 years after the end of WWII.  Television and household appliances like refrigerators were fairly new.  The film was made in the same year as Marty McFly’s destination in the first Back To The Future movie.  The first flying saucer report (Roswell) had occurred a mere eight years previously.  No human had flown in space much less walked on the moon.  Computers not only still used punch cards, they used vacuum tubes (the transistor was just starting to gain acceptance).

But here’s what really counts: The people who made this film had never seen Star Trek, or Star Wars, or really any decent science fiction.  Up until Forbidden Planet sci-fi consisted of things like Robot Monster (featuring a guy in a gorilla suit wearing a goldfish bowl on his head with TV rabbit ears glued to the top as the "robot") and the Buck Rogers serials which had rockets on clearly visible strings (and sometimes hands) with anemic-looking sparklers shoved up their backsides.  In other words, the people who made Forbidden Planet had never seen any good science fiction.

On the other hand, you can’t help but notice how many different ways later sci-fi ripped off Forbidden Planet.  Example:  The villain has this weird habit of putting periods in his dialog where they clearly don’t belong.  As an adult I now realize he was just muffing his lines- badly.  It seems likely those “periods” were actually the ends of printed lines in the script (small children have this same bad habit when reading aloud).  Nonetheless, it seems hauntingly familiar until you finally realize “hey!  That’s how Captain Kirk talks!” and it becomes all too clear as to where Shatner got the inspiration for that particular trait.  Indeed, Captain Kirk is completely indistinguishable from the Captain in Forbidden Planet in terms of characterization save for the odd delivery which comes from the villain.

Forbidden Planet also features sidearms which are called blasters (sound familiar?) that shoot colored dashes of light.  There are “gun batteries” which look almost identical to the ones used to defend Hoth in Empire Strikes Back.  But the most incredible moment is when you realize “hey!  That’s the inside of the Death Star!”  Yep, twenty-two years before Lucas “invented” it and better executed to boot.

This movie is so good on so many different levels it’s easy to forget when it was made.  The special effects are all first rate- easily equal to Star Wars but produced twenty-years before Industrial Light and Magic.  It’s the first movie ever to feature an all electronic score.  And the attention to scientific detail is impressive.  Example:  When the ship, traveling at “several times the speed of light” needs to decelerate to enter orbit around a planet, the crew all have to go into stasis to protect them from the several million gees which would turn them into strawberry jam.  We never see that in Star Wars/Trek.  ST: The Next Generation frequently gets patted on the back for being so prescient about tablet computers with their “PADDS.”  Yeah, well, Forbidden Planet has a scene with a handheld computer that bears a striking resemblance to a Nintendo DS- more than thirty years before Next Gen came out.

If you haven’t already seen it (or haven’t seen it recently) you simply must Netflix it or do what I did and buy it on E-Bay.  No one can count themselves a sci-fi aficionado until they have watched this groundbreaking classic.