Scene VI

The action ramps up to the max., as the monster attacks the ship and kills several of the crew. It's clear that Morbius is creating it, although there's some confusion about how Alta can detect it.

It’s nighttime and, like their prehistoric ancestors, the C-57D crew have built a mechanical bonfire to keep away creatures lurking in the dark. In this case they’ve literally ‘hauled out the big guns’ by turning the mess tables on their sides. As anyone in any firefight knows, turning a table on its side is total protection from any incoming fire up to, and including, thermonuclear warheads. The test firing isn’t impressive. One trusts that a re-make will have ramped up firepower. Anyway, now C-57D has twinkly Christmas lights to defend it, or to guide Santa into land. 

Adams makes peace with Farman, letting him know that there’s no hard feelings. You can see how the audience may be clued in here. Potential weepies who are rooting for Farman to get the girl should check their stock of tissues. In any sub-horror story featuring friction between two speaking characters, when one makes up with the other it spells trouble for one (or both) of them. 

Bleep…incoming! “Where away?” asks Adams, in a display of language Jack Aubrey would be proud of.

Now a lovely word that I had to look up when I saw Forbidden Planet for the first time…arroyo. I had no idea what this was. Here’s the definition:

(chiefly in southwest U.S.) a small steep-sided watercourse or gulch with a nearly flat floor: usually dry except after heavy rains.

It’s Spanish and literally means ‘rivulet/brook’. 

Adams puts the batteries on automatic, although this turns out to be the equivalent of flicking the lights on and off. You can imagine the battery guns rolling their eyes at each other under the ‘to err is human’ principal; computers I imagine don’t subscribe the second part of this maxim.

Adams says the false alarm may have been a ruse to direct attention from elsewhere. This begs the question: why then are the batteries facing only one way? If I was a malign alien force intent on destroying the ship, all I’d have to do is sneak up behind them. Luckily, Adams’ sense that any attacking force is going to originate from the landscape feature with the loveliest word ever created proves correct. Adams questions his spotter’s eyesight. No, all is well in the visual department. Even with 20/100 vision the target’s the size of a house so it’s impossible to miss. Adams peers into the gloom, his expression indicating that he can’t remember the date he last had his mandatory United Planets optometry test. Perhaps he’s allergic to Retnox 5 and needs glasses?

The sonorous pulsing of the radar does little to heighten the tension. Subsequent movies learned that radar/sonar pings of ever-increasing frequency can be used to send an audience into a frenzy of face covering. This was nicely demonstrated at the beginning of The Abyss during the nuclear submarine’s encounter with ‘whateverthefuckthatis’, and later when the umbilical cord is plunging down towards the rig. Here the radar bongs create as much tension as a school picnic. That means some, but not as much as there should be. 

The Museum of Science in Boston does an excellent electricity show several times daily where you can experience first-hand the noise that FX plunges through the speakers now. And the monster is revealed. 

“The blasted thing’s invisible!” yells Ostrow. Duh! Radar’s been telling you that for the past few minutes. It does look scary(ish). I’m sure in 1956 kids who’d snuck in illegally a la South Park: The Movie pooped their pants. I remember being about ten and having nightmares after seeing John Carpenter’s remake of The Thing at a friend’s house. Not being smart enough to know my limits, I then had insomnia after my parents allowed me to watch Alien about a year later. This blood red monster had fangs and white-hot piggy eyes It screams at the crew in a pre-cursor to the T-Rex from Jurassic Park. All the while it balances on two meaty legs, and we know what’s at the end of those, thanks to Ostrow’s plaster casting skills. 

The collective lumens of the Xmas lights have little effect, other than to make devil-Santa even more angry. Two brave crew members (not a red shirt between them) are brushed aside. Their injuries don’t look too serious. A couple of Band Aids and they’ll be back on the front line. Farman rushes forward to confront the monster, finally confirming what we’ve known since the opening scene - the man’s a damn liability. Did he seriously believe he could kill the thing by charging it with his portable leaf blower?

Poor Jerry. Didn’t get the girl, didn’t get the glory. 

All the crew do an excellent acting job of looking off screen, aghast at the mangled remains of Jerry’s corpse. Doc Ostrow in particular wears a ‘I’m going to have to clean that up aren’t I?’ expression.

Cut to Morbius’ lab. He’s nodded off at his workstation. Behind him, the energy output panel measures 10x16^th power (10 quadrillion, or 10 thousand trillion) krellamps. He’s having a bad dream, although with the position he’s fallen asleep in it could easily be a pinched nerve in his scapula. A distant scream wakes him. The monster vanishes and the gauges dwindle. 

For those in the audience who are a) drunk, b) stoned, or c) have given up on getting to first base this is the A-HA moment. Morbius=Monster. But wait…

Alta runs up to her dad saying she’s had a terrible dream of  “…blood and fire and thunder, and something awful that was moving in the middle of it…I could hear it roar and bellow.”

Could it be that, on deeper analysis, I see for the first time that Altaira has summoned the monster? How could they both see it? Is there a psychic connection between them? Alta has not been subjected to the Krell test as far as we know, although Morbius did summon a hologram of her when he first demonstrated the Krell IQ machine to Adams/Ostrow. Has the machine somehow linked Morbius with his daughter, so that his nightmares are now hers? Or could it be the other way around? Her nightmares become his and, unwittingly, what she has nightmares about he summons through his connection to the machine?

Monsters from the id, but whose id? 

I thought I had this aspect of the film in hand, but this scene makes me wonder. Re-watching several times, it’s clear that Morbius controls the monster. It disappears when he wakes up; Alta was already running down the passageway outside the lab. That she knows her way tells us that she is no stranger to this place, so perhaps she has been inducted to the Krell mind-boost? Alta’s concern for Adams is stated, so Morbius knows now (if he didn’t already) that his daughter has fallen in love with Adams. But what perspective does Alta see in her dream? Is it through the eyes of the monster, or is it (like us) though the fourth wall, the ‘outside’ of their reality?

If I may theorize, Morbius’ experiments with the Krell IQ machine have had a deeper psychic impact than he realizes. Through the IQ machine the deeper (living?) machine has established his subconscious as its reality. It has latched on to him and boosted not only his conscious mind and his subconscious (id), but also his sixth sense (and perhaps beyond that). Morbius said earlier that he seems to ‘see’ things that will happen. This prescience can only be given him by the machine, its power giving him foresight. Isn’t it reasonable therefore to conclude that, as any father might imagine, the bond with his offspring has also been boosted as part of this process? Morbius now projects to Alta what the machine is doing on his impulse. He doesn’t do this deliberately, but via a psychic connection that he is unaware of. So Alta is not the root cause of the monster, she is just seeing a reflection of what is leaching out from Morbius’ id. 

Back at the ship, the body bags are out. Adams goes on the 1MC to spout what is known in military terms as ‘bullshit’ by telling the men they successfully repelled the monster’s attack. Ostrow reflects the audience’s collective gasp at Adams’ gall. There follows a quick physics lesson that is probably designed to make the eyes of Jocks in the audience glaze over.

Adams picks a fine time to start quoting regulations, in this case section 86(a) dealing with evacuating civilians from a disaster area. One wonders if the three body bags under the ship have him beginning a mental review of the regs he’s breached/ignored so far. Clearly he’s now thinking of how he’s going to spin events to date in his report to United Planets command. It’s time to start doing things by the book. Luckily Ostrow looks to have a handy copy of the ship’s Rules and Regulations tucked under his arm in a fetching brown leather handbag. Indeed Ostrow’s already one step ahead and has looked up subsection (a) of section 86. He points out the flaw in Adams’ reasoning, “where feasible,” he says. Adams, spotting a know it all and - like all seat of their pants leaders - abhorrent of rule quoters, cleverly switches the conversation to the topic of getting a brain boost. That shuts Ostrow up!

Adams gives the bosun instructions to abandon the planet if the fence shorts before he/Ostrow return. The bosun looks about as happy as I would be in his shoes. Notwithstanding the fact that he won’t be able to enter the Bosuns’ Club back Earth-side without a piano-stopping silence. The other Bosuns will turn one will whisper “that’s him, the one who abandoned his captain to an atomic monster”. Further I suspect the Bosun’s read the Captain’s log reports on what happened to the Bellerophon and realizes this may be a lose/lose scenario. To add insult to injury, Ostrow presents the bosun with the Rules and Regs handbag. The bosun accepts it as if it’s a ticking bomb.

As the Bosun turns, we see that the three body bags clearly don’t have people (or even dummies) underneath them. It looks like Props just thrust a couple of car jacks under there. Either that, or what happens when an invisible organism constructed entirely of solid nuclear material that renews its molecular structure from one microsecond to the next kills you, is an enormous erection.