Monsters from the Id!

A lobby card for MGM's Forbidden Planet, 1956

We watched Forbidden Planet on TCM the other night. I hadn't seen it since I was about ten, when BBC2 showed it as part of a series of classic science fiction films, mostly from the 1950s and 1960s. The movies were shown on Tuesday nights, I think, and I was allowed to stay up late to watch The Day the Earth Stood Still or The Creature from the Black Lagoon on the condition that I got ready for bed first. The imposition of pyjamas only heightened the shivery tension as a boy crawled curiously to the edge of a still-glowing crater or a woman with startling hair was stalked by a blank-eyed alien impostor.

It's partly due to this early immersion in the science fiction genre that I tend to approach most films from its golden age with a nostalgic indulgence that pretty much anaesthetises my critical faculties. If there are improbably-designed ray guns and impassive alien invaders bent on slowly carrying human females up flying saucer gangways, I'm willing to tolerate dialogue that sounds like it was written the night before shooting by a recent Hungarian immigrant.

Your mother, understandably, doesn't share this aesthetic blind spot, so the fact that she endured all of Forbidden Planet without protest suggests a film whose appeal may not be limited to those who were once a certain kind of 10-year-old boy.

In fact, Forbidden Planet is a sublime film. It is extraordinary to look at, with its soaring, immaculately-painted backdrops and its laboriously hand-rendered special effects. It is a subtly powerful moral fable of human imperfectibility. It also has a really cool robot called Robbie and, as your mother noticed but I must have missed, a girl with a prodigious collection of short, futuristic skirts.

So, what's it about?

Well, it's about a planet, unsurprisingly. The planet is called Altair IV, and is the location of a human colony. Nothing has been heard from the colony since its foundation twenty years ago, and a military spacecraft, under the command of Commander John J. Adams (a very young Leslie Nielsen: try to see him in this role before you see him in the comedies of his later years; it will make his presence less jarring), has been despatched to find out what happened to the colonists.

Adams and his crew discover that Altair IV has only three remaining inhabitants: Dr Edward Morbius, who accompanied the colony expedition as a philologist (of all things), his daughter Altaira (she of the astonishing skirt collection) and the aforementioned Robbie the Robot, whose intelligence and advanced capabilities are a constant source of amazement to the new arrivals.

When the Commander and his men set out to discover more about the disappearance of the other colonists and about Dr Morbius and his decidedly odd ménage, they find the philologist to be less than forthcoming and his charming but utterly naïve daughter to be more than a little distracting.

Eventually, though, Morbius relents and admits Adams and his scientific advisor 'Doc' Ostrow to an amazing subterranean complex which, he explains, was built by the Krell, the former inhabitants of Altair IV who were suddenly wiped out 200, 000 years before.

The Krell, he tells them, were an immensely sophisticated civilisation with technologies far more advanced than man's. By way of demonstration, he shows them an "educator machine", part of a bizarre "nursery", designed to train the intellects of Krell children. Morbius has used the machine to "double" his IQ, but will not allow Adams or Ostrow to try it, insisting that it is far too dangerous.

Ignoring Morbius's warning, Ostrow sneaks into the nursery and tries to use the educator. He emerges staggering and raving, clearly undone by the machine. He manages to to impart a cryptic final message to Adams before expiring:

"They forgot one thing, John. Monsters! Monsters from the Id!"

I won't spoil any more of the plot, if only because I'm hoping the two of us can watch the film together some time before you're old enough to refuse. Suffice it to say that Ostrow's last words allude to the fatal flaw that led to the demise of the Krell.

Remind me, when we do get around to watching Forbidden Planet, to talk to you about the parallels between the film and Shakespeare's The Tempest, and about how it embodies Aristotelian ideals of tragedy.

Oh, alright then. Just watch out for the skirts.