Looking carefully at this
classic movie with post-Enterprise eyes, we see quite a few elements that
have now become familiar to the point of cliche.
While in transit, the rescue
crew receives shipwide announcements from Commander Adams (Leslie Nielsen)
by means of an intercom/public address system with a speaker mounted head-high
on the wall -- a nod to submarine communications protocol, but heady stuff
and something of an innovative flourish for even the best science fiction
films in 1956.
When the ship arrives on
the Forbidden Planet itself, the initial exploration team is composed of
the captain, chief science officer and chief medical officer, with blithe
disregard for proper command structure. Starfleet regulations would revisit
this urge to gather the leadership personnel of a deep-space vessel and
put them, collectively, in positions of extreme danger on strange new worlds.
This oddly casual approach
to shipboard discipline extends to the way these starfarers address each
other in disregard of their seemingly military system of ranks and command.
In Forbidden Planet, crewmen are addressed by last name, but staff
officers call each other by rank and last name.
The exception -- here as
on the Enterprise -- is the chief medical officer, who is called "Doc"
in a show of a deep-space informality unequaled before Kirk's flexible
ship discipline gave "Bones" McCoy a Starfleet niche in which to thrive.
Forbidden Planet uniforms
are similar to those later seen on Star Trek. In both sets of costumes,
each officer's area of responsibility -- as well as rank -- is indicated
only by small emblems on their otherwise utilitarian uniforms.
Finally, and perhaps on a
minor note, in Forbidden Planet we see a haunting reenactment of
the drama that too many classic Star Trek episodes would later play
out. While the science and medical officers solve the problem, the captain
gets the girl.
In Planet, this is
only a natural symptom of true love -- Adams' amorous attentions easily
change Altaira's (Anne Francis) lifelong thought patterns and beliefs -
but it only left me disgruntled after many a Trek episode.
Everything goes into the
future
Of course, Forbidden Planet
wears its own sources close to the surface, with the chief tip of the hat
usually going to Shakespeare's The Tempest.
Did Gene Roddenberry and
his designers, writers and costumers pay tribute to the classic film in
much the same way that the film paid tribute to Shakespeare?
We're not here to point fingers
-- it's the play that's the thing, and both works are classics of the genre.
"Borrowing" good (or, at
least, useful) story elements is so deeply ingrained in science fiction
that it has been used as a legal defense. When the world wanted more Star
Wars, the television series Battlestar Galactica stepped in
to fill the void.
In the ensuing courtroom
battle over who was or was not copying whom, the Galactica legal
team's expert witnesses included Isaac Asimov, who pointed out not only
that Lucas' "fighting the tyranny of the evil empire" plot had an extensive
body of precedent or "prior art" within science fiction, but his own seminal
Foundation trilogy paid homage to Gibbon's Decline and Fall of
the Roman Empire.
That brings up another important
point. We can all think of elements of favorite SF movies that have shown
up elsewhere, and the genre itself routinely collects on the favor by borrowing
from outside the field. After all, exciting is exciting, and copyright
depends not on the story but on how you tell it.
At one point, "space opera"
was the term applied to sci-fi stories strongly reminiscent of the western
"horse opera," which itself was then seen clearly as a modern mythos drawing
on and recreating prior works of entertainment. It's not for nothing they
call Star Trek the Wagon Train in space.
The art of echoes
I recall an article in the
Christian Science Monitor comparing a still from Star Wars
-- a view inside the cockpit of the Millennium Falcon -- to a still
from 1949 air-war epic Twelve O'Clock High.
In the Star Wars shot, the
"windscreen" was ahead, with the bottom end of a defensive gun turret visible
behind the pilot and co-pilot. Han Solo was in the act of reaching up to
an overhead control panel, flicking a series of toggle switches.
In the Twelve O'Clock
High still, we see inside the cockpit of a B-17, complete with the
bottom end of a defensive gun turret behind the pilots. The pilot is reaching
up to an overhead panel to flick a series of toggle switches.
It is a credit to George
Lucas and his actors that you could lay these movie stills over each other
and find no discrepancies in either the physical scene or the position
of the actors.
Remember: it's not so much
the story as how you tell it.
It is only natural that all
our favorite stories of politics, sex, and violence (Shakespeare's winning
triple-play) should be reborn in a contemporary mythos suited to the style
and spirit of our times.
Where the great frontiers
once open to individual freedom, high adventure and heroism existed in
sparsely settled and unexplored regions of this planet, now we must look
to space for the frontier spirit and elbow room "to boldly go where no
man has gone before."
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