Forbidden Planet

Forbidden Planet is a science fiction film very loosely patterned on Shakespeare’s The Tempest produced in 1950. Everyone’s seen this picture which is a precursor, in some ways, to later, more prestigious Sci-Fi films made in the next couple decades. Walter Pidgeon plays the Prospero character, marooned on a desert planet near the star Altair. Robbie the Robot, beeping and buzzing, stands for Ariel. Stalking the planet is a ferocious monster from the id, envisioned as a cloud of red lightning that coalesces into the outline of a fiery tiger. Leslie Nielsen plays the bold star fleet captain, a sort of proto-Kirk of the Starship Enterprise – even as a very young and handsome man, Nielsen was inherently funny. The crew of Nielsen’s star ship are typical GI’s grumbling and wisecracking from any number of budget World War II movies contemporaneous with this film. The picture has an electronic score that is startlingly abstract even by today’s standards – a collage of the kinds of noises that old tube radios made when you spun the tuning dial. The pictorials are frequently gorgeous, the underground factories of the long defunct Krell spectacular, and, yet, the film is highly schematic, unlike its source, completely devoid of any real humor, and ultimately strangely airless and boring. Critics can prove to you that this film is admirable, but it’s not very much fun.