Welcome to The Weekend Watch, a weekly column focusing on a movie—new, old or somewhere in between, but out either in theaters or on a streaming service near you—worth catching on a cozy Friday night or a lazy Sunday morning. Comments welcome!
As a new Alien movie hits theaters, I wanted to highlight one of that franchise’s more interesting and historic influences for The Weekend Watch: Forbidden Planet. Among all the sci-fi films that writer Dan O’Bannon would take from in crafting his revolutionary space horror, Forbidden Planet was (alongside The Thing from Another World) one of the earliest. It’s a tale of a militarized crew, led by a young Leslie Nielsen, checking in on a former interplanetary expedition only to be warned away. That crew is subsequently picked off by an unknown killer after failing to heed that warning. Heavy, innovative stuff for 1956, even if it is riffing on The Tempest. As our Andy Crump wrote when we placed Forbidden Planet on our list of the best sci-fi movies ever made, it’s “high-quality, intelligent science fiction, featuring state-of-the-art special effects.” Those effects include (spoilers) an invisible beast, a sizable spaceship set, film’s first all-electronic score and the lumbering Robby the Robot—the latter of which would go on to be one of the most iconic representatives of early Hollywood sci-fi. Forbidden Planet is available to stream on The Criterion Channel, Hoopla and Tubi.
Though they’re perhaps not the most impressive elements of Forbidden Planet, its mysterious unseen monster and the narrative’s structure around the deaths it causes are the main touchstones Alien preserved. As Commander John J. Adams (Leslie Nielsen) and his team start getting to know Dr. Edward Morbius (Walter Pidgeon), the sole survivor of the original mission to Altair IV, and his daughter (Anne Francis), folks start dropping like so many uniformed flies.
To get deeper into spoiler territory, the gorilla-like monster who’s murdering the crew members is a manifestation of Morbius’ id, come to life thanks to alien technology that has increased his intellect to such levels that he can physically manifest his own thoughts. It’s totally nuts, a sci-fi appropriation of Hollywood’s infatuation with psychoanalysis. In Irving Block and Allen Adler’s original story, the invisible ape-beast was just an alien, plain and simple. Screenwriter Cyril Hume gave it a Fruedian coat of paint—one that may have persisted in the xenomorph’s primal drives (and the computer named Mother).
But even more fun than this wacky twist is how Forbidden Planet makes its invisible critter visible. Running this idea-beast into a force field, its outline becomes legible thanks to animator Joshua Meador, loaned to the MGM production by Disney. The longtime Disney worker (animating all the way from Snow White through Donald in Mathmagic Land, the educational film you probably saw in school) had just won an Oscar for 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and his reputation led him to be outsourced for duty here. Meador did the drawings of the creature in pencil, which were shot on high-contrast film, reversed to the negative, and voila: A red-tinted outline of an invisible monstrosity, glowing and abnormal. It’s a freaky mid-movie reveal, and surprisingly effective in an otherwise campy-fun piece of sci-fi.
These moments of genre impact are greatly enhanced by the innovative, haunting blips-and-bloops soundscape created by Bebe and Louis Barron. Avant-garde contemporaries of John Cage, their ring modulated music was a wonder of cybernetic theory, magnetic tape and post-production manipulation; it was so far from what was going on in film music at the time (and the Barrons so far from being in the industry union) that they were credited only for “electronic tonalities.” You can get a brief demonstration of how that works in this cool video from Ben Burtt and the Academy.
The film’s other striking feature (aside from its pervasive, laughably cruel ‘50s sexism) was its lumbering android, though it wasn’t masquerading as a human member of the crew like Ash. Robby the Robot is a polite, hulking oblong; a super-strong metal butler who follows Asimov’s Laws and supplies the movie’s lovable drunk with an endless supply of liquor that he synthesizes himself. C-3PO would never. Seven feet of molded plastic and complex electronics, Robby was a big investment—it’s no wonder that a stuntman got fired after showing up sloshed and nearly falling over in the million-dollar robot costume. With mechanical representations of an abstract face, humanoid arms and a dry wit, Robby was a leap forward for robot film characters. He was so beloved, and so expensive, that he was reused over and over again: MGM used him a year later for The Invisible Boy, then in tons of TV, including Lost in Space, Mork & Mindy, The Man from U.N.C.L.E. and three episodes of The Twilight Zone.
If its robot could last, so could its ideas. Forbidden Planet’s influence is visible in everything from Stephen King to Star Trek, from Mass Effect to Doctor Who. Though Alien would forever change what it meant to be trapped in space with an unknowable terror tearing through all you know and love, Forbidden Planet understood that at the root of these fears was humanity’s own hubris. Whether that emotional understanding comes from space-set Shakespeare or from a doomed astral trucker tapping on an alien egg…well, the more things change, the more they stay the same.
Jacob Oller is Movies Editor at Paste Magazine. You can follow him on Twitter at @jacoboller.
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