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| The Supermanesque title font is an odd fit for the psych-horrorkino that's about to come. |
By far the greatest science fiction movie ever made, Forbidden Planet is pointless to discuss without spoilers, so before we get into it, I'll simply note that you can blame it for the uniformed pontificating of Star Trek and the invincible robot shenanigans of Terminator and Chopping Mall.
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| At this stage, crewmembers were not yet marked for death by shirt colour. |
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| Robby was so popular he had an otherwise unrelated spinoff movie, The Invisible Boy. |
But on the spoiler front, Planet cuts much deeper than you might infer from its frivolous legacy. Ostensibly an extremely loose reworking of Shakespeare's The Tempest, Planet abstracts from the personal to depict an archetypal tragedy at the level of an entire civilisation. Leslie Nielsen's spaceship crew touch down on the Forbidden Planet (1956) to investigate the strange case of Dr Morbius (Walter Pidgeon), survivor of the lost ship Bellerophon who has since made a home there with his daughter Altaira (Anne Francis).
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| I want to live in Casa Morbius and freak out my guests with my reinforced bunker shutters. |
Morbius has been studying the fate of the planet's former inhabitants, the ancient race of ayylmaos known as the Krell, whose sudden disappearance left intact a raft of kino sets augmented by audacious matte paintings whose monumental scale feels realer and vaster than whatever nonsense slopscapes CGI has wrought.
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| The emptiness left by the absence of the Krell themselves is palpable and haunting. |
Of course, if you've seen the film you know the secret: the Krell had managed to repress their most primal unconscious drives until their technology hit a point of singularity at which they were unwittingly released and wiped everything out in a single Event Horizon style blood orgy of annihilation. The Jungian resonance of the monster from within is subtly foreshadowed (lol) throughout the picture.
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| "Flying saucer" spacecraft invading Earth were already a venerable cliché by this point. Here, the saucer lands on an alien world and discharges a human crew: a clue that the monster is us in the very opening of the picture. |
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| The bright red, curved claw of the id monster looks a lot like the comet logo on the crewmen's hats, which are of course positioned right over the brain. JuSt A cOiNcIdEnCe though! |
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| OK, the position of the claw cast probably wasn't intended as a phallic symbol, but when your material is the unconscious mind, associations kind of form themselves, don't they? |
The Krell also recall the civilisation described in Lovecraft's At The Mountains of Madness, who were wiped out by their mindless shoggoth slaves. And of course Warhammer's warp realm, moulded by the unconscious emotions of the living inhabitants of the material world, owes everything to Forbidden Planet's monsters from the id.
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| tHe EfFeCtS aRe DaTed! Yeah but imagine this fucking thing coming at you halfway into a night shift. |
Bellerophon was a hero in ancient Greek mythology who slew the chimaera but was eventually destroyed for his hubris in attempting to fly to Olympus on Pegasus, the winged horse; to transcend the human condition in defiance of his remit in the celestial hierarchy. At the very juncture in our history when we aspire toward a Krell-mode point of total repression and technocorporate singularity, the savage forces we deny are real threaten to bubble over and drown everything in slaughter. Now, more than ever, I bid you remember the fate of Yugoslavia, and the partition of India, and the horror that has overwhelmed the Middle East; and to recall the archetype of Babel, and why the story was set down in ancient times.
