Forbidden Planet - The Memorable TV DVD Review

A dutiful robot named Robby speaks 188 languages. An underground lair offers evidence of an advanced civilization. But among Altair-4's many wonders, none is greater or more deadly than the human mind. Forbidden Planet is the granddaddy of tomorrow, a pioneering work whose ideas and style would be reverse-engineered into many cinematic space voyages to come.

Leslie Nielsen plays the commander who brings his spacecruiser crew to the green-skied world that's home to Dr. Morbius (Walter Pidgeon), his daughter (Anne Francis)...and to a mysterious terror. Featuring sets of extraordinary scale and the first all-electronic musical soundscape in film history, Forbidden Planet is in a movie orbit all its own

THE VERDICT

A true scifi classic from the genres golden age of the 1950's and one that for its day featured some great special effects not to mention the genius that is Robby the Robot of course. Apparently some of the characterisation for the movie was taken from Shakespeare's The Tempest and you can easily see the influences that it wrought on later scifi series such as Star Trek and especially Lost in Space. One of the major plus points is the way the writers don't fall for playing down to their audience - a problem that befell many other scifi flicks of the fifties and sixties.

Forbidden Planet actually remains highly relevant in today's technological age - the Krell race that originally ruled the planet has been subsumed by the giant computer they built to free themselves from the shortcomings of their physical bodies, Nielsen realises that the computer must be destroyed to save the planet. You could say the same thing is happening in our world right now, people quite literally being consumed by their technology - a situation which over the next couple of generations can only reach epidemic proportions. Forbidden Planet then was one of the first major studio scifi movies and is still very much worth today fifty years later.

THE EXTRAS

There is a whole slew of fantastic extras in this carefully put together release from deleted scenes; Lost Footage; MGM Parade excerpts [1955 TV, series]; 1958 The Thin Man: Robot Client TV Episode; Theatrical Trailers, 2 - 1957 MGM feature film - The Invisible Boy, plus other, bonuses - Watch the Skies!: Science Fiction, the 1950's, and Us [2005 TCM documentary]; Amazing!: Exploring the Far, Reaches of Forbidden Planet; Robby the Robot:Engineering, a Sci-Fi Icon.