About the Movie
In the 23rd century, the starship C-57D travels to Altair IV to learn what became of a colony expedition that vanished twenty years earlier. The only survivors are Dr. Edward Morbius (Walter Pidgeon), a philologist who has spent two decades studying the remains of the Krell — a civilization that destroyed itself at the height of its power — and his daughter Altaira (Anne Francis), who has never seen another human being. Their servant is Robby the Robot, who can synthesize anything from food to diamonds and is programmed never to harm a human.
Commander Adams (Leslie Nielsen, in a straight dramatic role) and his crew are welcomed politely and warned away in the same breath — and then something invisible begins killing their men. Director Fred M. Wilcox and the writers borrowed the bones of Shakespeare’s The Tempest: Morbius as Prospero, Altaira as Miranda, Robby as Ariel, and an unseen monster with a source far stranger than anyone expects. At 1 hour 38 minutes, it is lean, strange, and far more psychological than its poster suggests.
Why This Movie Matters to Sci-Fi
Forbidden Planet was the first science fiction film made as a genuine A-picture: a major-studio budget, CinemaScope, color, and a serious theme treated seriously. Its electronic score by Bebe and Louis Barron — the first entirely electronic film score — still sounds alien today, and its depiction of a starship crew with ranks, procedures, and a chain of command was noted by Gene Roddenberry as a direct influence on Star Trek.
Robby became the genre’s most famous robot and a pop-culture fixture for decades. More importantly, the film’s central idea — that advanced technology amplifies what is already inside us, including the parts we would rather not admit to — gave screen sci-fi a psychological depth it had rarely attempted before.
