Directed by Fred M. Wilcox from a script by Cyril Hume that was based on an original film story by Allen Adler and Irving Block, Forbidden Planet is a movie that is forever in the zeitgeist of what 1950s American science fiction looked like. It’s also the first movie to show hyperspeed travel, to feature a robot with a personality — Robby the Robot — and to use an electronic soundtrack. It’s also kind of, sort of The Tempest, which is a big idea to get your head around.
After a year in space, United Planets starship C-57D wants to land on the distant planet Altair IV and see what happened to an expedition that landed there twenty years ago. One of the survivors, Dr. Edward Morbius (Walter Pidgeon), tells them that it’s too dangerous for them, but Commander John J. Adams (Leslie Nielsen) lands anyway.
Joined by Jerry Farman (Jack Kelly) and “Doc” Ostrow (Warren Stevens), Adams discovers that everyone but Morbius is dead. His wife may have died of natural causes, but he claims an unseen force killed everyone else one by one. Other than his servant Robby, the only other living thing is his daughter Altaira (Anne Francis).
Proving that men will always be men even in the future, Adams finds Farman kissing Altaira and yells at both of them — him for his behavior and her for how she dresses. She looks too attractive! His men have been on a ship all alone for a year! And you know, when he sees her swimming, he kisses her too! And then a tiger attacks him, and she has to shoot it with a blaster.
Morbius has been using materials he found from the previous occupants of this planet, the Krell, which have made his brain twenty times smarter. There are also 9,200 nuclear reactions below the planet, making it filled with energy, power that Adams wants to bring to Earth. Morbius gets angry and says that they don’t deserve it.
At the same time, that alien force kills Engineer Quinn (Richard Anderson, years before The Six Million Dollar Man) and Farman. It turns out that the same technology that increases Morbius’ brain power has also unlocked his id, unleashing a monster that kills at his subconscious command. This becomes even more obvious when Altaira tells Morbius she is leaving with Adams. Robby detects the approaching creature, and his master commands him to kill it, but the robot recognizes it as Morbius and shuts down. After accepting the truth, the creature disappears, and Morbius dies, just in time for his daughter to leave the planet, which blows up real good.
To offset the high cost of this movie, its props were reused again and again. The spaceship appears in the Twilight Zone episodes “To Serve Man” and “On Thursday We Leave for Home;” Robby is in The Invisible Boy and plenty of TV shows before he became a star on Lost In Space, including “One for the Angels,” “Uncle Simon” and “The Brain Center at Whipple’s” on The Twilight Zone, his head dome appearing on “The Bridge of Lions Affair” episode of The Man from U.N.C.L.E. and even all the way to the 70s, Robby was Chuck on Mork & Mindy, as well as appearances on the shows Project UFO and Space Academy as well as the movie Phantom Empire.
This movie is so well-known that it’s the film within the Mystery Science Theater movie.
Forbidden Planet has a 4K restoration from the original 35mm negative by Arrow Films, as well as a reversible sleeve featuring original artwork options, a double-sided fold-out poster, a reversible sleeve featuring two original artwork options and a collectors’ booklet containing new writing by critics Frank Collins and Johnny Mains, plus select archival material. There’s also Unearthly Aura, a newly filmed appreciation of Bebe & Louis Barron’s pioneering electronic score by historian and composer Neil Brand; Watch the Skies!: Science Fiction, The 1950s and Us, an archival documentary; Amazing!: Exploring the Far Reaches of Forbidden Planet, an archival documentary; Robby the Robot: Engineering a Sci-Fi Icon, an archival featurette; deleted scenes; lost footage; The Invisible Boy, a bonus movie featuring Robby the Robot in his second feature film; “Robot Client,” an episode of The Thin Man TV series featuring Robby the Robot; two excerpts from MGM Parade; the script; a trailer and image galleries. You can get it on 4K UHD or Blu-ray from MVD.
