Forbidden Planet
1956
Director: Fred M. Wilcox
Starring: Leslie Nielsen, Walter Pidgeon, Anne Francis
“In the final decade of the 21st century, men and women in rocket ships landed on the moon.”
Oh, from this laughable beginning starts the incredibly silly yet legitimately entertaining sci-fi ride that is Forbidden Planet. The film was made in 1956; I mention this because it’s incredibly important when considering the more ludicrous parts of the film. Think of it – this film is pre-Sputnik. Humans had never put anything into space – ever. Star Trek was a thing of the future, and Star Wars was considerably far off. Hollywood is to be somewhat forgiven, then, with their bizarrely stereotyped image of space exploration and adventure.
The crew of an elite (and fundamentally American) space ship is sent to a distant planet for a search and rescue mission stemming from a lost colony 20 years earlier. On landing on the eerily earth-like planet, the captain, played by Leslie Nielsen (yes, THAT Leslie Nielsen, more on that later) is greeted by the somewhat unnerving Doctor Morbeus (Pidgeon), apparently the only survivor of the failed colonization, his beautiful daughter Altaira (Francis), and the helpful domestic Robby the Robot, the first of Robby’s many subsequent Hollywood appearances. Morbeus warns the captain and his crew to leave at once, that the rest of the settlers were killed in horrible ways, that they must flee if they want to keep their lives. The captain says no. While a romance develops between the captain and Altaira, scary and inexplicable things do indeed start happening to the crew. The truth of the horror is, well, a little cheesy and a bit overly complicated, but the film has a satisfying conclusion nonetheless.
