Scene I

A Chapter by TheMoldy1

This chapter covers the first part of the movie, where cruiser C57-D approaches, and makes contact with, Altair IV.

Our adventure begins in space. Into a star-spangled universe appears a flying saucer. Oh the irony! In this future, spaceship designers have finally consulted experts whom actually know how to build interplanetary craft. If it’s good enough for little green men then it’s good enough for big pink men. Then in stunning astro-vision, which looks damn cool at the cinema, comes the title:

FORBIDDEN PLANET

The Flash Gordon-esqe way that the title is done; the same glaring red and yellow from Flash’s 1980 remake. Then comes the music. The music to Forbidden Planet broke new ground. Other electronic scores like Chariots of Fire or Blade Runner owe the composers a debt. It is not overstating it to say that, with all the FX and money spent on props (although ‘prop’ would be accurate), the soundtrack of Forbidden Planet is the most startling thing about the film. As we shall learn, the music has not just been added in for marketing purposes. It will create a new dimension to the visual representation. Can any other film lay claim to the soundtrack being such a fundamental part of the viewer’s experience? Evoking emotion yes: Barber’s Adagio for Strings at the end of The Elephant Man gets me every time; and the haunting music in the final scenes of Andrew Patterson’s 2019 masterstroke The Vast of Space evokes deep feelings. But the music is not entwined into these films like it is with Forbidden Planet.

A CD of the soundtrack was released in 1986. Whoever was responsible for naming the tracks deserves a special pat on the head. The listing contains such tantalizing titles as:

6. A Shangri-La in The Desert/ Garden with a Cuddly Tiger,

10. Robby Arranges Flowers, Zaps Monkey,

11. Love at The Swimming Hole,

And my personal favorite…

18. Robby, The Cook, And 60 Gallons of Booze.

The sense of what’s to come is aurally released in weird, picking tones. My dog is fascinated by the sounds. Ears up, he’s in front of the TV trying to decide if this is a pack of space dogs trying to make contact.

Now a monologue. In post-Alien films, like 2010: The Year We Make Contact this would be done by computer text typed on the screen, accompanied by that faint clicking noise you get when you call a phone bot and it pretends there’s a real person typing in the background. Please! Everyone knows there’s nobody there. It’s time for a potted history of space travel to date:

- The final decade of the 21^st century, on the moon. Wow, nailed that by over a hundred years. Was it really that big of a jump from 1956 to 1969 for a moon landing? The Apollo program was only five years away. To be fair (and I feel Robert A. Heinlein, as SciFi’s ‘social’ grandmaster would have approved) the narrator say that it’s “men and women”. So if we’re sticking to the facts of the cinematic case they’re actually spot on and we’ve less than eighty years to get there.

- By 2200 AD (we’re in the pre-PC religious age, so forgive them for not using CE) we’ve cracked the solar system. Sometimes SciFi is drastically short-sighted with its predictions. I’m sure by 2200 CE we’ll have cracked Mars, but the outer planets? Maybe Jupiter with an atomic drive (Clarke & Kubrick came too soon in 2001: A Space Odyssey), but not right out to the edge of the solar system.

- Soon after 2200, the holy grail of deep space exploration: the hyper-drive. I’m impressed that George Lucas went for this in Star Wars, putting light years between himself and Gene Roddenbury’s warp-drive. It’s interesting that Roddenbury didn’t pick the hyper-drive, since he was influenced by Forbidden Planet. The Millennium Falcon got hyper-drive, and the Enterprise got warp-drive. You say tomato and I say tomato. It amounts to the same thing, faster than light travel (SciFi writers usually acronym this as FTL to avoid the finger-tip-numbing retype over and over again). The reader will, I assume, not desire a lecture on relativity; this is good since I don’t understand it. However Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time should do the trick. If the reader is (quite possibly) only ever my brother, then he knows he need not read that as he’s got a degree in Astrophysics.

United Planets [Trek Alert: the United Federation of Planets?] Cruiser C-57D circles on its mission to the Altair system. The crew of C-57D should have wondered about the similarity to the word altar, as in ‘sacrifice on the’. You wouldn’t get me going near no star that, removing one vowel in Scrabble, produces the shrine for religious execution.

I’ve gone too far. Let’s be kind and rewind.

Forbidden Planet is, in my opinion, the greatest science fiction film ever made (apparently George R.R. Martin agrees). Yes it’s outdated, but what middle-aged film isn’t? Alien looks frayed now, and that was made over twenty years later. If I showed my teens John Hurt’s chest-bursting scene they’d barely look up from their devices to say “Meh”. What makes Forbidden Planet is the existential plot. The main theme is a re-view of Shakespeare’s The Tempest. On that front I am going to read The Tempest. This was not on my English Literature curriculum at school, unlike The Merchant of Venice which I recall ended up being a horror story involving flesh hacking. So in order to save you dear reader, and (I hope) fan of this film, from having to actually confirm or refute this, I will take one for the team and read The Tempest over the approaching Xmas break. Luckily I picked up the Bard’s Collected Works at the Goodwill for less than the cost of a Starbucks - a bargain, but sad statement on the value of the printed word. Below I am typing [Insert Review] so that I don’t have to do this right now. It’s deep-Fall and I’m working on a novel re-write.

[Insert review]

F**k, I didn’t do it! Frankly I think I was kidding myself. I heartily used Wikipedia and there are definitely similarities in setting and characters:

Setting - a remote island (Altair IV) [Trek Alert: Altair III and VI both appeared in Star Trek, most notably VI which popped up in the Kobayashi Maru simulation at the beginning of The Wrath of Khan. Sadly IV wasn’t mentioned, but as it’s not there anymore that’s ok.]

Island characters: Prospero (Morbius) and his daughter, Miranda (Altaira) plus two servants: Ariel (Robby) and Caliban (a ‘savage monster figure’).

Vessel characters: Antonio, Alonso, Sebastian, Ferdinand, Adrian and Gonzalo. Six talking parts, which can be equated to the Captain, Doctor, Astrogator, Chief, Bosun and Cook. The Cook is interesting because The Tempest is both tragedy and comedy. In Forbidden Planet it’s the Cook who provides the comic relief (usually along with his sidekick, Robby).

Where were we? Ah yes, on our way to Altair IV.

The inside of C-57D is all 1950’s hotel chic. There’s so much space that you wonder if there’s a TARDIS effect in play. Subsequent decades’ spaceships will be all cramped and have lots of sexy instruments. Not C-57D. The only exciting object is a center-stage stellarium containing a model of the ship. This is the ‘pimp my ride’ version of the real ship, with red trim and shiny dome. Maybe it’s the model the FX department made to show the producers what they wanted C-57D to look like. When they costed it, I suspect the producers opted for the Henry Ford version, “you can make it in any color, as long as it’s silver”.

Here’s our hero. He’s clearly the Captain because his left arm is cocked lazily on his hip in a ‘catalogue pose’. The uninitiated reader may, at this point, get an itch in their memory. That face, that voice. Why is it so familiar? Well, let me tell you. You are looking at Leslie Nielsen. Yes, Mr Naked Gun. Mr Airplane. An actor whose (almost) entire career was based on making an a*s of himself. But not here. No, here he’s playing it straight. Clearly this was before he hit (or descended into, depending on your point of view) the heights (or depths) of comedy. I feel that whatever led Nielsen to go into comedy deprived the acting world of…no you’re right, he made the correct choice. Yet here he’s the perfect match, and you know why? For the same reason that William Shatner was perfect for Captain Kirk. He needed to be stern, strict, captainly. But there had to be the possibility that beneath that gruff command, he was really a funny guy. He was someone who liked to joke with the other captains, even with the other ship’s officers. Unlike Gene Hackman’s stonewall Captain Ramsey in Crimson Tide (who would empty an open mic comedy night in 60 seconds), Nielsen’s captain just might fancy himself a comedian.

The ship is approaching “DC point”. DC what now? Something to do with DC Comics? Perhaps SciFi fans in the 1950’s could automatically translate this to ‘deceleration point’.

The Captain makes an announcement, and the crew assumes DC stations. Avoiding the (presumably splattering) effects of DC - and apparently having not invented inertia dampeners which one would imagines are a prerequisite for FTL travel - involves standing on a platform with a circular projection above and below. This then lights with an eerie, phosphorus glow as protective force fields kick in. [Trek Alert: here we perhaps see the inspiration for the Enterprise’s transporter system. Of course the effects got sexier as the decades went by, but you can see the point. Cooky is obvious as a man ahead of his time. Sporting a pristine white apron, we see that the concept of the ‘house husband’ has translated well into the +2200’s.

The musos go crazy as, along with the guy who picked the color scheme, they try to impress on you how crappy DC is. Using nothing but two of the five senses, the AV team replicate the drastic assault on your audio/visual cortex that DC induces. It looks like a really bad trip, before people started doing acid and experiencing this sort of s**t for real. The crew emerge like they’re waking up from a serious bout of shore leave. In modern SciFi, to indicate trouble ahead, one of them would likely have been in a malfunctioning beam. The scarlet effects of this would have given the FX team an early chance to go nuts. As the crew disperse, one of them slides up-screen on what can only be described as a reverse fireman’s pole [Trek Alert: This mode of transport was used in The Motion Picture, and also in The Wrath of Khan, to avoid a rotund Scotty having to take the McStairs].

We get our first hint of trouble brewing. The temperature on the ship is described as “warm”. This appears to be an understatement which, as an Englishmen, I appreciate very much. It is clearly roasting, but it seems that the United Planets have adopted the English weather attitude for space travel. Obviously this is a practical response to confinement for long periods. If the truth were let out, something akin to “What the actual f**k? It’s hotter than a w***e’s crotch in here!” then the rule of law would quickly deteriorate. What’s needed in long-haul space travel is high manners. I applaud this selection wholeheartedly. The Captain checks and we’re alerted to a wrinkle, if you will, in the (up until now) silky smooth operation. His comment “Jerry, you…” leaves us dangling. The implication is that whatever word was going to conclude that sentence will be saved for a private keelhauling.

The 1950’s had not yet awakened to the principal that ‘to err is human, but to really f**k something up requires a computer’. So here it’s Astrogator (and XO) Jerry who’s setup to fail. He’s brought the ship out of hyper-drive too close to Altair. No computerized control; it’s hand to eye/seat of your pants stuff. Just like the real space race, which was - like the insides of C-57D - also heating up at the time, (a) man was still in command and human fallacy still existed. We’re also primed for the possibility that ‘Jerry’ is a risk, something that will be proven several times in the film. Here it’s enough to note that he pisses his Captain off by executing an attempted flyby of Altair.

The Captain opens the viewer. We’re greeted with a shot of Altair so full on that one imagines the crew are trying to remember where they left their sun cream. Cut to a beautiful shot, honestly stunning, of C-57D transversing an eclipsed Altair. A similar shot was used in Alien as the Nostromo approached LV-427. Both films relished the grand scale of a cosmic parallax.

Jerry pats himself on the back for putting them “on the nose” of Altair. This obvious obliqueness to his commander’s opinion is another warning sign. Jerry we feel, won’t be up for promotion anytime soon.

Having survived Jerry’s attempt to roast the crew alive, we’re en route to a safe orbit around Altair IV. Now we get a mission briefing from the Captain. They’re here to look for survivors of the Bellerophon scientific expedition, which landed 20 years earlier. Another nice shot of C-57D arcing through space; the effect is so lovely. When you look at a pre-digitalized version of the Rebel attack on the Death Star from Star Wars, and you see the imposed X-wings, you realize that FX appeared to go backwards in twenty years. C-57D glides through space like it’s got nothing better to do than impress you. If you look closely, you can also see a planet tracking as the ship moves. I love this! Watch any made for TV SciFi and you won’t see that. It’s just a star field background. This shows real care and attention. That being said, Altair IV itself looks crap on the view screen. ‘Doc’ makes a flippant comment about how God makes lovely planets. Please! This may have been inserted into the script to make the film more appealing the the Bible Belt. It’s one step removed from “And on the 9^th day, God created Altair IV”.

Now a contradiction. The ship changes ‘flux’. This isn’t explained but appears to be an alteration in its left/right axis. But does everyone go sliding to the left side of the ship? No. So their inertia dampeners worked OK for that then did they? But I’ll give them this in exchange for another cum shot of C-57D sliding into orbit.

The Captain (arm cocked on hip again, his alpha male leitmotif) gives the crew a survival briefing, and I mean ‘brief’. Of interest is the planet’s oxygen content: 4.7 richer than Earth standard. Happy Dayz ahead for all.

Alas, Altair IV is devoid of life. No sign of the chirpy Bellerophon colonists. All is lost. Years of tedious space travel with nothing to do but eek out the meagre supply of rocket bourbon, and no chance of a shag (and be not confused, this is the top thing on the minds of the enlisted crew). Looks like the ship’s supply of tissue paper will need to be re-rationed.

But wait, what’s this?

The Chief informs that the ship’s being radar scanned (not just scanned, but RADAR scanned). Presumably for those viewers not employed in enemy aircraft detection in WW2 radar was still a novelty. What follows is a squelch of sound that one assumes a sound engineer got by un-tuning his radio. The Captain sounds the space version of General Quarters, now known as “Combat Stations”.

Next the Chief announces there’s a voice.

“Human?” Inquires Nielsen. “Sounds like it,” replies the Chief.

So we learn there has been contact with non-human intelligence before. Else why would the Captain ask if the voice was human? If there was no alien contact, what else would the voice be? This prepares the viewer for the shocking events to follow. Like all good 50’s SciFi, the principal theme was ‘other worlds and their life’. Perhaps the cryptic events at the conclusion of the film Contact have led to humanity getting more than a ‘wish you were here’ postcard from the galactic milieu.

On speaker comes a voice so Shakespearean that one imagines the actor holding a plastic skull whilst reciting the modern equivalent of ‘O stranger, who art thou?’. The Captain finally identifies himself as J.J. Adams (Trek-ish Alert: did J. J. Abrams copy this?). The disembodied voice is Dr. Edward Morbius, the expedition philologist. That the expedition had a philologist also suggests the likelihood of contact with alien races, else what’s the point? People in space are expensive: food, water, body, effects, air, etc. so you can’t afford to have wasted space. With no previous alien contact, taking a philologist along would be like Dr. Livingstone taking his barber with him; comforting, but excessive.

Morbius audibles the crew a middle finger, but Adams justly points out that he does have his orders. Morbius gives his version of the disclaimer you receive when installing a new piece of software. Adams treats it with the same distain, but Morbius is at least now legally covered anything untoward happens to C-57D on Altair IV. Of course this warning clues the audience that this is mission is not going to be a walk in the park. Some serious s**t is going to go down on Altair IV. Adams, who’s probably the only one who’s read past page 10 of the script at this point, knows this of course. In fact I rather suspect that, like Ash in Alien, he’s been given a secret briefing warning him to expect trouble. Something along the lines of “Adams, we’ve lost contact with the colony on Altair IV”.

Adams takes over the controls from Jerry, who now can’t be trusted to use the microwave let alone land the ship. But first Adams issues a security alert and authorizes blasters all round. Huzzah, it’s going to be a shoot ‘em up! Perhaps the crew imagine lasering defenseless aliens out of the sky with the ease of Han Solo bagging a mynock. Cooky probably has a recipe all lined up: mynock stew, no wait…mynock surprise! That would be more apt because the crew really is going to get a mynock surprise, the surprise being there ain’t no mynocks on Altair IV, and what’s actually going into the stew is…

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