Forbidden Planet (1956)

Sci-fi classic beautifully restored

Forbidden Planet was always a science fiction favorite of mine due to it's outlandish setting, great acting, great sets, great characters, excellent science fiction and human element. It's pretty much everything good science fiction should be but too seldom actually achieves: intellectually stimulating, frightening, sexy, bold in story and look, fantastic, etc. This 2006 remastering is stunningly beautiful even on a standard DVD. Someone kept or found an excellent print or negative which is very fortunate.

So in this Forbidden Planet DVD we have arguably the most significant science fiction film of the surrounding decades beautifully restored to probably better than it's ever been seen in a theater. Kudos to the makers and restorers of this classic.

For those who haven't seen Forbidden Planet, it's been likened to Shakespeare's Tempest set in space, but it has interesting plot twists of its own. This film significantly influenced every movie or television series set on a spaceship, particularly Star Trek which followed about a decade later.

The extras include deleted scenes which were rightfully deleted. Those scenes edited out, the theatrical release is much tighter, if one can forgive the ugly jump cuts that result.

I highly recommend this science fiction classic, especially for the wonderful remastering. November 10, 2008

BAD DVD - not the movie just the DVD received

I received the DVD. It would not play on my DVD player. Thinking that the HD DVD would not play on the older DVD player, I purchased an HD DVD player only to find out the DVD was actually BAD - NOT IN PLAY MODE. November 2, 2008

Monsters From the Id

When FORBIDDEN PLANET was released in 1956, science fiction films tended to be low budget black and white affairs that called to mind aliens attacking earth when Americans still recalled vividly GIs storming the beaches at Iwo Jima. Director Fred Wilcox wanted to continue the very recent trend blazed by the slightly earlier THING FROM ANOTHER WORLD which similarly suggested that science fiction could reflect some serious subtexts. Here, Wilcox took the essentials of Shakespeare's THE TEMPEST and incorporated Walter Pidgeon in the Prospero role as Dr. Morbius, Anne Francis as Altaira (Miranda in THE TEMPEST), and the invisible monster from the ID as Caliban. Moviegoers were immediately entranced for all the right reasons. Leslie Nielsen as the captain was properly heroic as the one who emerged as the most insightful of his crew despite his failing to register high on the Krell brain booster. It was he who directed his crew to defend their ship against the ID beast. It was he who wound up with the lovely Altaira. And it was he who determined how to defeat a creature that was deemed too impossible to exist. Part of the allure of FORBIDDEN PLANET was the seamless melding of drama with comedy and ultimately with tragedy. The drama lay in how the crew from earth could avoid being picked off one by one as the crew of the Bellerephon had been twenty years earlier. As did Shakespeare in many of his tragedies, FORBIDDEN PLANET has several moments of low comedy (mostly in the intonations of Robby the Robot interacting with the goofy Earl Holliman). And the tragedy came not from the deaths of the crew but from the conversations of Dr. Morbius who sadly bemoaned the deaths of the technologically advanced Krell who in Morbius' words: "Could hardly have known what was killing them." Tying these three disparate elements into a cohesive whole was the Freudian subtext of the monsters from the ID. Morbius refused to grant until the very end that even his beloved Krell could yet retain a semblance of human emotion that might damn them just as thoroughly as it did for Freud's patients. There is a telling scene at the end when Morbius finally realizes the ghastly truth that it was he who was responsible for reviving the ID beast. He faces the beast and denounces it, all the while knowing that he can no more disavow it than he could disavow his own inner demons. As he confronts it, the captain takes out his blaster and points it at Morbius, realizing that the only way to stop the beast was to kill Morbius.

Even after watching FORBIDDEN PLANET numerous times over the decades, I can still eagerly view it with each viewing, much like one of Shakespeare's plays, revealing a new facet to enjoy. The special effects, top notch as they are, are not what I take away from any viewing. What brings me back again and again to the fold is the realization that what is normally forbidden for anyone to make use of is under the right circunstances a license for brutality that can overwhelm the best of anyone us, including even the godlike Krell. November 2, 2008

An over-rated classic.

Let's be honest here......had it not been for the jaw-dropping special effects (at least for the time), this mundane flick would have been quickly forgotten. As another reviewer pointed out, most of the money for the production seems to have gone for the effects, with only a token amount devoted for the cast and soundtrack. Robby the robot alone cost some $100,000 to create...not a small sum for the mid-1950's. I like Leslie Nielsen, but he was just getting started here. A bit green and it shows. Walter Pidgeon, an otherwise fine and gifted actor, was far past his prime by the time he did 'Forbidden Planet'. Leggy Anne Francis comes off more as dingy blonde prick tease than anything. And I can only assume that a booze-guzzling Earl Holliman was inserted as comic relief.

The politically correct crowd will find a lot to gripe about with this film. There wasn't a single African-American in the entire cast. And apparently, females had not yet been trusted to operate, much less travel in, interstellar spacecraft, since Nielsen's crew is entirely male. And even they begin acting like immature teenage boys as soon as they get an eyeful of Anne Francis. As the only female character, she didn't do much to advance the feminist cause. This sort of thing could be found in any number of films from the 1950's. 'Forbidden Planet' most certainly was not the only one.

The most annoying thing about this film is the soundtrack. OMG...what were they thinking? An overheated theremin (along with some creative use of reverb and echo) pushes out a near-constant stream of bleeps, warbles, shrieks and other noises that don't sound anything like music. Imagine a pair of white-hot sewing needles being inserted into your eardrums. This film would have been so much better served by a soaring, orchestra-based soundtrack.

All in all, this is NOT a bad film, but it has some bad qualities. Worth watching at least once, if for no other reason because it's a classic. But not worth the tons of praise I've seen heaped on it over the years. October 20, 2008

Forbidden Planet

This is a movie that I have loved since I first saw it as a child. I bought it on VHS and finally on DVD. Although it is old, the special effects for that time period were outstanding. It is actually the only movie that I have ever seen Leslie Neilson acting in a serious part. October 13, 2008

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