70 Years Ago, Forbidden Planet, Flaws and All, Changed Sci-Fi Forever
Return to Forbidden Planet. If you dare.
On March 3 and 4, 1956, at a humble science fiction convention in Charlotte, North Carolina, called SECon II (Southeastern Science Fiction Convention), roughly 30 people got an early screening of what one hardcore enthusiast, at the time, called “the first real s-f film, as fans know science fiction.” That film was Forbidden Planet, a pivotal film in the history of science fiction, and the moment that the type of SF previously found in print began making its way into the mainstream. The reviewer who called it “the first real s-f” film was Robert A. Madle, writing a brief convention report for the fanzine Fantasy Times. He also noted that the people in the audience (again, very small, made of hardcore fans) were “sitting on the edge of their seats,” and “comments following the showing were enthusiastic.”
Today, this might seem like an understatement, considering the degree to which Forbidden Planet changed pop culture, or at least pioneered a certain kind of mainstream space-oriented science fiction which would dominate mainstream TV and film sci-fi for decades to come. (For what it’s worth, they didn’t call it sci-fi back then, by the way, hence s-f.) The question now is, for being as formative as it was, if you showed Forbidden Planet to a small audience of hardcore sci-fi fans now and they’d never seen it before, what would they think? The answer is probably this: Forbidden Planet is a beautiful film, way ahead of its time visually and sonically, that now feels slow, poorly paced, and full of concepts that the 1960s Star Trek did much better, and with more joy. In short, in 2026, 70 years after its release, Forbidden Planet isn’t greater than the sum of its robot parts, but some of its parts are not only great, but now woven into the basic fabric of science fiction in general. Mild spoilers ahead.
Forbidden Planet was written by Cyril Hume, based on a story by Irving Block and Allen Adler. Before it became the film we know today, the initial concept was far simpler and considerably less interesting. The Block and Adler take (first titled Fatal Planet) was about a mission to the planet Mercury, and the battle with an ape-beast. Crucially, Hume’s rewrite of the movie injected a more intellectual angle, which, today, scans as almost a rough draft for the original Star Trek. Gene Roddenberry screened Forbidden Planet to his Star Trek collaborators in 1964 to get a sense for the vibe he was going for.
Like Star Trek — at least early 1960s Star Trek — Forbidden Planet presents a story about a spacecraft crewed by people who behave in a roughly navalist way, assigned to check on the status of an older Earth spaceship, the Bellerophon, which was lost on the planet Altair IV years prior. (Both Star Trek pilot episodes in 1964 and 1954 find the crew searching for clues about a lost Earth mission, too.) Why does this detail matter? Well, at the time, having a science fiction movie that presented interstellar space travel as an established fact, rather than a gee-wiz new invention, was somewhat novel. The opening narration of Forbidden Planet tells us that “In the final decade of the 21st century, men and women in rocket ships landed on the moon. By 2200 AD, they had reached the other planets.”
An early poster for Forbidden Planet.
This modest timeline is notable again, because it does some pretty brisk world-building without trying too hard. The fact that Forbidden Planet puts the Moon landing about 100 years later than it would actually happen is kind of hilarious, but the idea that there’s not faster-than-light travel until the 23rd Century feels oddly more plausible, both then and now. Plausible, however, is not the same as realistic, and what makes Forbidden Planet so important as a major Hollywood movie for its time is that it plays the science fiction of the film fairly straight, despite the pulpy or outrageous design. There are probably more words written about Robby the Robot — the most expensive movie prop ever built up until that time — than there are about any other aspect of Forbidden Planet. But what makes the movie worth watching, or, perhaps, worth studying, isn’t the robot. It’s the tone.
Despite the fact that human beings are going through space in a flying saucer, firing space blasters, and generally looking like the collective memory’s idea of retro sci-fi, Forbidden Planet’s vibe is largely dark and depressing. In a nutshell: Nobody from the Bellerophon survived, save for a bonkers scientist named Morbius (Walter Pidgeon) and his now-adult daughter Alta (Anne Francis). Altair IV is home to technology left over by an extinct, super-advanced alien race called the Krell, who could use the power of their minds to do just about anything. The only downside is that this technology can turn the dark subconscious of the mind, or the id, into a physical monster. The rest of the Bellerophon crew, we learn, were murdered by a shadow monster created by Morbius’ mind. Defeating it and getting away from the Krell tech is the only way that Commander John J. Adams (Leslie Nielsen) can save everyone.
Everybody’s obsessed with Alta. It gets old, fast.
Based on all of that, Forbidden Planet sounds incredible, right? To add to that, it looks utterly beautiful with matte paintings and animation from Joshua Meador that hold up today. The soundtrack, composed by Bebe and Louis Barron, was made entirely of electronic music. And even though we think of Nielsen as a comic actor, he does a decent job as a proto-Captain Kirk here. So, what’s the problem with the movie today?
In short, what makes Forbidden Planet less than brilliant today is threefold: The prevalence of sexism in its first act is extremely distracting, by both 1956 standards and today. The plotting is poorly paced, with everything great crammed into the last 15 minutes. And, finally, let’s face it, Star Trek did it better a decade later.
Because the crew of the starship C-57D are all male, and Alta is the only woman in the movie, a ton of time is spent on this notion in the first two acts of the movie; the ship is crewed by horndogs, and Commander Adams has a kind of Honeymooners relationship with Alta, constantly getting mad at her, even though he’s interested in her as much as his leering shipmates. Again, this feels out of place in 1957; the movie even told us that men and women were space pioneers in the backstory to the film. The sexism isn’t so much offensive as it is boring and drawn out. We’re way more interested in the Id monster and the Krell than anything going on with Commander Adams and Alta.
Which one of these dopes should Robby blast?
Which leads us to the Star Trek paradox. Clearly, there is no Star Trek in the 1960s without Forbidden Planet, but because so many of us today saw Star Trek first, it’s impossible not to see Forbidden Planet as a less entertaining version of Star Trek. Like “The Cage” and “Where No Man Has Gone Before,” Forbidden Planet tells a speculative story about how the final frontier isn’t the ability to travel through space, but perhaps concerns about the power of the mind. If our minds can create energy and power, what is the difference between a human and a God? Where Forbidden Planet introduces these themes with Shakespeare-esque gravitas, Star Trek smartly always made those kinds of conflicts deeply personal as well as philosophical, especially in its first two pilot episodes.
Today, the end of Forbidden Planet feels like the end of a pilot episode of a sci-fi TV series that never got going. Robby the Robot is at the controls of C-57D, and Alta has joined the crew. But the future that those characters were flying into wasn’t their own, but rather a sci-fi landscape crafted by creators who saw this film and thought, yes, but what if it had even more heart?
