And the crew come under attack by the monster. A spectral outline hurls itself against their perimeter shielding—but it disappears when Morbius wakes from a nightmare. . . .
At last Morbius reveals his secret. He has been exploring stunning machinery left behind by the long-dead alien Krell. In the film’s finest sequence the men explore a twenty-mile-wide cubical machine buried in the ground; walkways, with ant-sized astronauts passing along them, bridge what looks like the interior of an immense valve radio.
There are headsets to boost your intelligence—which is how Morbius was able to build Robby—and the machine’s purpose is to enable the materialization of thoughts: Think it, and it becomes real. But as well as crystallizing conscious ideas, the machine also unleashes the subconscious rage of your deeper mind, the id. This unfortunate side effect killed off the Krell themselves.
And as he unwisely tinkered with the machinery, Morbius’ own released demons did for his crewmates: the id-monster is Morbius’ other darker self. Now Morbius’ unhealthy jealousy over his daughter threatens to wipe out Adams and his crew—but Morbius at last sacrifices himself, leaving Altaira in Adams’ arms.
Planet
, made in 1956, is distinguished from other genre movies of its time in that it is
actually quite good science fiction.
This was recognized by the field’s practitioners. It is said that one master sf author (Lester Del Rey) remarked to another (Frederik Pohl), “That’s the first original science fiction movie I’ve seen that could have made a fine novelette for
Astounding
” (the top sf magazine of its day).
This was despite the fact that none of the principals involved in
Planet
had had much involvement with the genre before. Before
Planet
, director Fred McLeod Wilcox was best known for his work on
Lassie Come Home.
With a screenplay by Cyril Hume from a story by Irving Block and Allen Adler, the story was original (or at least, as Shakespeare was long dead, out of copyright—see below).
The production, filmed in Cinemascope and bright Eastman Color, took two years, costing a then-hefty $1.6 million—indeed this was the first sf film to cost in excess of $1 million. But it was money well spent. The production design was fine throughout—arguably the finest in genre movies until
2001
a decade later. The id-monster was effectively animated by Josh Meador, who had worked at the Disney studios. The planet Altair IV, around the landed spacecraft, was created on a vast set with a circular wall painting; in some sequences you can see the crewmen actually walk off into the distance, without ever colliding with the painted mountains. The soundtrack by Louis and Bebe Barron, or rather the “electronic tonalities,” without a bar of melody, was created entirely electronically and cost a cool $25,000.
Planet
was unusual for its time in showing a relatively positive future, of men (mostly) and technology united in a future of prosperity and peaceful exploration. In the 1950s Cold War fears shaped sf. Many of the finest genre movies dealt with the horrors of Communist invasion and nuclear war either directly, like
On the Beach
(1959), or through metaphors of alien invasion and mind control, like
The War of the Worlds
(1953) and
Invasion of the Body Snatchers
(1956). It wasn’t an age of exploration and wonder but of hunkered-down fear, in which you didn’t go seek out the alien, but it came to hunt you down in your home.
But that’s not to say that
Planet
was escapism.
Planet
has an intellectual depth that remains impressive. This colorful genre movie, all spaceships and ray guns, is a steal from Shakespeare! The Bard’s play
The Tempest
(written about 1611) is beamed up from an island on Earth to an island in space. Shakespeare’s Duke Prospero becomes Morbius. The virginal Miranda is Altaira. The supernatural sprite Ariel becomes Robby, and the subhuman creature Caliban is the id-monster.
There may be cultural nods in the name of the
Bellerophon
too. In Greek myth Bellerophon stole the winged horse Pegasus and, trying to fly up to heaven, was killed. Alternatively
Bellerophon
was the ship that took Napoleon to his final exile on the island of St. Helena. Either of these sound like workable metaphors for Morbius, but the reference is never explored in the movie. In contrast to all this mythical stuff, the ship from Earth is utterly utilitarian, with no name at all but a number, and its all-male crew, dressed only in gray, have lust but no romance in their souls: “Nothing to do but throw rocks at tin cans, and we gotta bring the tin cans.”
So the movie has depth. But it isn’t without faults, such as the utterly leaden humor. Suffice it to say that Robby gets the best lines.
And then there is Altaira. It’s not uncommon for movies of this period to make uncomfortable viewing regarding their treatment of women, but this one is particularly teeth-curling. Altaira, after all, has been effectively imprisoned by a father who, as is hinted darkly, may lust incestuously after her himself. She has grown up almost feral, never having met another adult save her father, and has a total and supposedly charming naïveté: “What’s a bathing suit?” The salivating men of the C-57D ruthlessly exploit this naïvete in trying to get it on with her. Commander Adams
blames her
for provoking this behavior, before moving in for the kill himself. The movie’s treatment of Altaira is both creepily exploitative and a missed imaginative opportunity.
These faults aside, the movie’s dark tone, sophisticated emotional maturity, and multiple meanings have been unpacked by its audiences ever since its release.
There is humility in Morbius’ encounter with the Krell. Just as conquering Anglo-Saxons once cowered in superstitious awe of ruined Roman cities, so even the starfaring humans of the future are dwarfed compared to the mighty achievements of this vanished race. You might even look for a biblical parallel. Adams is like Adam, and Altaira like Eve, in a planetary Garden of Eden whose equilibrium is ruined by their kiss.
On another level, perhaps there’s a metaphor even in this expansive movie for the bombs-and-bunkers horror of the Cold War: You meddle with advanced technology at your peril. Shakespeare’s Prospero was a ruler and an intellectual who gave up power but stayed in the world of knowledge. In the 1950s, however, scientists were distrusted; so Morbius’ curiosity about the Krell machinery is foolish arrogance that nearly ends up killing everybody. He’s not the only scientist in sf to have echoes of another literary prototype, Faustus.
In the end, however, this tale of starships and alien machinery is all about humanity. Adams’ sense of duty is compromised by love, and the id-monster is an embodiment of Morbius’ murky jealousy over his daughter. So it isn’t the Krell machinery that threatens the humans but their own inner flaws. Many sf tales of exploration are extrapolations of the American dream of the frontier: We can put our conflicts behind us if only we can find enough room. But
Planet
tells us that no matter how far we travel, we can’t leave ourselves behind.
Fifty years on,
Planet
remains influential—and not just in the borrowing of its name by Britain’s leading specialist sf chain. The movie’s innovative use of electronic music and striking visuals have found endless echoes; it is impossible to gaze on vistas of vast alien machinery like those in
Total Recall
(1990) or
Babylon 5
’s Epsilon 3, for instance, without recalling the chambers of the Krell. Its psychological storyline is often homaged too. The id-monster is echoed in at least one of the theories about the meaning of the current hit TV show
Lost—
set, of course, on another island.
Robby remains one of the best-loved robots ever seen in the movies. His inability to harm humans, drawing on the then well-established Laws of Robotics set out in Isaac Asimov’s
I, Robot
stories, places him light-years away from the usual “kill-all-humans” idiot-robot portrayal much panned in
The Simpsons
but still, ironically, taken seriously in, for example, ironically, in the movie
I, Robot.
Robby went on to star in an unrelated kid’s movie called
The Invisible Boy
(1957). The “Danger, Will Robinson!” robot of the 1960s TV hit
Lost in Space
wasn’t Robby, but it wasn’t terribly unlike the altruistic avatar of Altair. Robby toys are still produced, and original models are highly prized collectibles.
The movie’s strongest influence is secondary, however, through
Star Trek
. Explorations in space have always been a key theme in science fiction—for instance, AE van Vogt’s
The Voyage of the Space Beagle
(1950). But media folk tend to be influenced primarily by other media products, and
Trek
creator Gene Roddenberry made no secret of the fact that his thinking was heavily shaped by
Planet
.
Planet
’s echoes are obvious even in
Trek
’s original pilot,
The Cage
. For the United Planets read the United Federation of Planets. As Commander Adams went before him and James T. Kirk would later, brave Captain Pike leads the
Enterprise
on an adventure of interplanetary discovery. The C-57D, with the Navy-cruiser feel of the
Enterprise
, is stocked with an earthy doctor and a ship’s engineer of the traditional mold (“All right, it’s impossible. How long will it take?”).
Planet
has sliding doors, force-field shields, communicators (mounted on the crew’s belts), and a replicator (in Robby’s belly). Just like Adams, Pike finds human survivors on a remote planet. And Pike gets first dibs on the beautiful girl, just like Adams, and just as Kirk would many times.
To some extent all of
Trek
’s planetary excursions took place in the shadow of Commander Adams’ sole expedition. Kirk and his successors would frequently find themselves humbled before the titanic achievements of superior races. And
Trek
often demonstrated its visual debt to the movie—for instance, the Krell underground complex is reminiscent of the interior of a Borg cube.
Even
Planet
’s nod to Shakespeare found many echoes in
Trek
, beginning with the
Original Series
episode, “Conscience of the King,” which featured a production of
Hamlet.
Who could forget General Chang, in
Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country
, a movie which actually took its title from a Shakespeare line, taunting Kirk with quotations from the Bard, which always sounded better “in the original Klingon”? In a sense the circle was closed in the
Next Generation
episode
Emergence
, in which, in a holodeck production of
The Tempest
, the robot Data, a distant descendant of Robby, actually gets to play Prospero.
Trek
emulated
Planet
in mixing interplanetary adventure with strong characterization and at least an attempt at moral complexity. Even if
Trek
rarely achieved the multilayered depth of
Planet
, without the movie’s prior demonstration that at least some of the audience could accept such seriousness in sf,
Trek
would surely never have dared go where no franchise had gone before.
And, amazingly,
Forbidden Planet
itself has stayed imaginatively alive. The hilarious 1990s stage musical
Return to the Forbidden Planet
deconstructs the movie by putting Shakespeare’s lines
back in
, and by camping up the cheesy 1950s skiffyness—think Troy Tempest-style peaked caps and epaulets, a roller-skating silver robot, and ray guns made from Bakelite hair dryers. This is a homage to the movie that
Planet
’s makers could barely have imagined but surely would have loved.
Forbidden Planet
showed that spectacle and seriousness could combine in effective genre movie-making, and it casts a long shadow today. But as is the fate of much of the best sf, maybe it was too smart for its cinema-going audience. While contemporary so-bad-it’s-good B-movie dross like
Earth vs. The Flying Saucers
raked it in, and Roddenberry’s son-of-
Planet
behemoth went on to become a multibillion-dollar franchise,
Planet
itself recouped only half its budget.
Author and Story Notes
Stephen Baxter
started to read sf in the 1960s, so he was immersed in the culture of the 1950s: Asimov, Clarke, Dick, Sheckley, and the rest—and
Forbidden Planet
, regularly shown on TV all through his formative years. Not surprisingly, it’s had quite an effect . . . as you can see from the Afterword to this volume.
Steve is currently working on a series of history-tampering novels called
Time’s Tapestry
. In addition, he’s continuing the
Time Odyssey
series in collaboration with Sir Arthur C. Clarke.
In his introduction,
Ray Bradbury
has owned up to the fact that, had the plan to have him write the screenplay for this much loved SF movie gone ahead, the first thing he would have done would have been kill off Robby the Robot (or at least severely downgrade his status in the film). The second would have been to make more of the Id. Somewhere, on one of the alleged myriad alternate Earths, that movie was made—now all we need to do is find a way to get there. . . .