The Power of Shadows

Looking back, I suppose that one of the formative experiences of my life – in a small way – came in the spring of 1983, when the BBC ran a season of classic SF movies from years gone by. Every Tuesday night for a couple of months I would switch over at the end of Doctor Who and enjoy whatever was left of lots of terrific films (sadly, the schedules didn’t always coincide), including many of the ones I’ve written about here quite recently: Invasion of the Body Snatchers, It Came From Outer Space, This Island Earth, War of the Worlds, Invaders from Mars, When Worlds Collide, Silent Running, The Forbin Project, and no doubt others I’ve forgotten. That was the kind of horizon-broadening experience you only really have a few times in your life.

Looking back now, most of the 50s-vintage films were basically B-movies, and I’ve described them as such when talking about them here. It would be a great disservice to put Fred Wilcox’s Forbidden Planet into that category, though: it isn’t necessarily better than its contemporaries, but it’s at least as influential as any of them, and in terms of its budget and production values it was clearly intended as a major release.

In the 23rd century, the Earth space cruiser C-57D arrives in the Altair system. A scientific expedition vanished here twenty years previously, and Captain Adams (Leslie Nielsen) is under orders to investigate. On Altair III he discovers reclusive academic Morbius (Walter Pidgeon) and his daughter (Anne Francis), together with their robot servant Robbie. Morbius is not keen to see them and is wont to issue dire warnings of a mysterious and implacably hostile force which inhabits the planet – and when the cruiser and its men come under attack from an inexplicable, unseen entity, it seems that Morbius’s baleful predictions are coming true…

Forbidden Planet was a real trailblazer, the first example of genuine space opera in cinema. It introduces so many of the standard elements of the genre as we know it today it’s hard to know where to begin. However, the first problem modern audiences will have with the movie is that it’s almost painfully aware of how innovative it is. This isn’t really a negative thing, but the problem is that – particularly in the opening third of the movie – the story frequently grinds to a complete halt so the audience can fully appreciate how whizzy and new the sights and concepts they’re being exposed to are.

Luckily, this is still a lavishly beautiful movie and so it never really drags. The special effects and visuals here far outstrip those of any other film of its period – where This Island Earth (perhaps its closest cousin in terms of visual spectacle, but still a distant one) is eyecatchingly garish and striking, Forbidden Planet is quite simply breathtaking. The opening scenes of the cruiser approaching the planet, the journey into the heart of an alien machine complex, the attack on the ship by the invisible monster – sequence follows sequence, all of them still bearing comparison with the best of modern special effects.

However, it’s more than just a visual spectacle, as the film does address some moderately weighty philosophical and moral issues: specifically, the darkness at the base of the civilised mind and the shadows we all carry within us. (Famously, it does so within a plot structure derived from Shakespeare’s The Tempest.) It’s by no means alone in this, of course, and in many ways it’s much less subtle in its presentation of its themes than any of Jack Arnold’s B-movies, but it does combine some intellectual meat with visual splendour. One less fortunate consequence of this is a script which is often painfully wordy. Pidgeon in particular gives a very stagey performance, declaiming his lines at the drop of a hat, while the romance between Nielsen and Francis never seems like more than the plot requirement it is.

All the great SF movies of the Fifties played some part in shaping the genre in the cinema, but Forbidden Planet‘s influence surely extends vastly further. Underpinning the plot is the idea of Earth operating a fleet of starships, very much along the lines of the contemporary navy, and it’s literally impossible to think about this concept without recalling the many different incarnations of Star Trek. Indeed, the premise of this movie – starship is sent to check in on a scientist or lost mission – forms the basis of two early Star Trek episodes, including the original pilot. Kirk himself is a character very much cut from the same cloth as Adams, while amongst the C-57D’s crew there is the captain’s hot-blooded pal, a reserved scientist, and a miracle-working technician. Of course, this being a movie rather than an ongoing series, some of these guys have a lower life expectancy than their small-screen counterparts, but the parallels are still very obvious.

Forbidden Planet isn’t as obviously a fun or exciting film as some of its contemporaries – it’s trying a little bit too hard to be serious for that, waving its theme like a banner where another film would smuggle it in. But the technical achievement of the film is exceptional and it is unparallelled in its influence upon the genre as a whole. It would be over a decade before any film remotely similar would be released, and perhaps that’s the highest compliment one can pay any piece of SF: it was ahead of its time in 1956, and by no means solely of interest for historical reasons now.