Forbidden Planet

When I was a youngster there were many cinemas in our area, such as the Odeon, Regal, Astoria, and ABC, so we would often go to see as many as four films in a week. Since we married my wife and I tend to go at least once a week, so I calculate that I have seen several thousand films at the cinema, let alone the many more that I have watched on television.

However Forbidden Planet was the first that I ever saw at the pictures, in 1956, when I was very young, and it scared the life out of me, for, although at that time I did not understand the essence of the story, the monster from the ID was terrifying. This was ironic as I later became a devotee of Star Trek, many features of which were first to be found in Forbidden Planet.

The story is based upon The Tempest by Shakespeare, with Walter Pidgeon as a scientist, Edward Mobius, representing Prospero, who with his daughter Altaira, played by a very attractive Anne Francis, in the equivalent role of Shakespeare's Miranda, lives on a planet Altair IV, upon which he and his crew mates, now all dead, had landed many years before. Robbie the Robot is his Ariel, and the ID monster is Caliban. In a role very different from the comedy characters he played later in his career Leslie Nielsen is the valiant Commander Adams, with whom Altaira falls in love, as did Miranda with Prince Ferdinand in the original play.

Quite apart from the film laying the groundwork for so many science fiction movies of later years, it also used the ideas of Sigmund Freund concerning divisions in the human psyche, the Super Ego, the Ego and the ID. The unwise use by Dr Mobius of a machine developed by an extinct race, living on the planet millennia in the past, allowed monsters from the primitive ID to wreak havoc upon anyone who stood in their way.

The love story between Altaira and Commander Adams is a central theme, but the idea of intelligent beings unable to ever fully escape the primitive subconscious is a concept not usually raised by films of that era.

Now I am an adult I can see that this film is in fact one of the best ever made, in view of its later influence on so many others, and I recommend it to any who have never seen it before, although perhaps not to impressionable youngsters, although no doubt modern kids would just take it in their stride.