The Forbidden Planet, as
it turned out, was no exception. The film opens with a United Planets search
and retrieve rescue mission to Altair-4 where 20 years earlier, a prospecting
team aboard the Bellerophon landed and lost contact with civilization.
Of course Bellerophon, in
an ominous bit of foreshadowing, was the Corinthian hero in Greek mythology
who defeated the chimera with Pegasus, only to dramatically prove that
humans are not gods as he plunged to his death trying to reach Mount Olympus.
A long way to go
Unfortunately, even with
hyper-fast engines, it's a year-long trip from Earth out to the Altair
system. As a result, the all-male rescue crew has gotten a bit ... restless
by the time they finally arrive.
The odds look good for survivors
when Doctor Morbius (Walter Pidgeon), a member of the Bellopheron
crew, warns them away from the planet. Commander Adams (Leslie Nielson,
bearing nary a trace of his campy later career) disregards the warning
and is greeted at the landing site by Robby the Robot, zipping in directly
off the pages of Asimov's I, Robot.
Robby transports Adams and
two of his crew (let's call them Spock and McCoy) to see Morbius the pretentious
philologist (it's never explained why they sent a linguist to explore a
supposedly deserted planet) and his beautiful daughter, Altaira (Anne Francis).
Morbius treats them to a
synthetic lunch (Robby, apparently, is a god and can create matter out
of nothing), orders Robby to shoot Adams (Robby can't, as he strictly obeys
all Laws of Robotics), and tells a strange tale of how a malevolent force
destroyed his entire team but left him untouched. No one believes him.
Descent into savagery
Meanwhile, Adams' crew starts
cannibalizing their ship to build a communications satellite. Cookie, the
rascally chef, has finagled Robby into manufacturing "rocket bourbon" and
the Spock predecessor (acting decidedly unSpocklike), gives the wickedly
sexy Altaira -- who has, of course, never known a man -- kissing lessons.
That night, an invisible
being sabotages the communications equipment, forcing Adams to pay another
visit to Morbius and his scantily clad daughter. As it turns out, Morbius
is hiding an entire subterranean world of technology - including an IQ
doubler - left by the former inhabitants of Altair, the shadowy Krells.
However, Morbius generally
behaves in an odious manner and refuses to share his technological discoveries
with humanity. As he so loftily informs Adams, "One does not look on the
face of the Gorgon and live" -- another Greek allusion -- and mocks the
man's inferior "monkey brain."
The invisible monster returns
the next night and this time kills several crew members. Morbius predicts
great bloodshed later. Much as he'd like to blame the linguist, Adams was
with Morbius during the attacks, and Cookie was boozing it up with Robby,
so all the natives have alibis but the lovely Altaira.
Despairing, Adams decides
to abandon the planet and take Altaira with him.
Monsters from the id
Meanwhile, the McCoy predecessor
fatally doubles his IQ and deduces that they're being attacked by a Krell-enhanced
physical manifestation of Morbius' id. Truthfully, of course, Altaira would
be the more logical suspect -- particularly with her own libidinal urges
awakening for the first time.
Morbius, horrified at the
depredations of his inner demon, stops the attack by obliterating his own
mind. Right before he dies, he initiates a planet-wide self-destruct mechanism,
fulfilling his desire never to have to share the Krell technology. Adams
and Altaira depart as Morbius and his Forbidden Planet explode in a flash
of blue light.
In a Freudian gesture that
may now seem to be just another quaint alien artifact of the '50s, Doctor
Morbius' inflated ego caused endless unpleasant friction but it was the
base nature of his id that ultimately destroyed Altair-4.
Like a forbidden fruit, the
Forbidden Planet contained knowledge and technology that far surpassed
human responsibility (or Krell responsibility, as they too were destroyed
by their own devices), providing a not-so-subtle societal warning about
the instability of human nature, especially in regards to destructive technology.
The atom bomb lurks behind so many of these films.
Altair-4 began as an Edenic
paradise where wild animals interacted with the innocent Altaira almost
as equals, certainly as friends. Then, ominously, the rescue mission compromised
the paradise by introducing vice to the planet in the form of alcohol and
lonely men.
As Altaira explored the vices,
Morbius grew sufficiently enraged to knock her out of paradise, destroying
the garden of her girlhood.
Significantly, even while
the planetary Eden thrived, Morbius' island paradise was predestined to
fail. It's nearly impossible to maintain a civilized society in a deserted
locale with just a hermit father and his daughter, especially when the
father is a bit of a monster.
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