When Rachel and I decided that we couldn't afford to go to the Odeon Cinema in Tunbridge Wells anymore (after their most recent ticket price rise), I decided to institute a Film Night of our own ... a chance to catch up on all those DVDs that we've been promising each other that we should sit down and watch together.And what better film to start this new (hopefully) regular Thursday night ritual, than the grandpappy of modern science-fiction films: Forbidden Planet.
For a film half a century old, especially one full of special effects, Forbidden Planet doesn't show its age; it's still as slick and beautiful a thing as it was when it first played in movie theatres back in the 1950s.
The technological props - from Robbie The Robot and the spacemen's tractor to the alien gadgets and giant machines - are works of art that wouldn't look out of place in many science-fiction shows nowadays.
Leslie Nielsen, then a romantic lead and action hero rather than a comedy stooge, leads his hardy crew to a colony a year's travel from Earth, where they find the only survivors are an eccentric professor, his beautiful daughter and their faithful robot servant, Robbie. Nielsen takes it on himself to investigate the fates of the other colonists and the secrets of this alien world.
Admittedly, Forbidden Planet starts comparatively slowly, but the interplay of the characters is always engaging and the sets and scenery, both inside Nielsen's ship and outside on Altair IV, are stunning. The final reveal, at the heart of the third act, of what's really been going on makes everything fall into place and you can't help but appreciate the mastery of Cyril Hume's script.
Based loosely on Shakespeare's The Tempest (and the inspiration for the award-winning musical Return To The Forbidden Planet), I believe this movie can - now - also be read as a template for Lost - with Professor Morbius and his daughter as The Others, the Monster from The Id as the 'black smoke' and the alien Krell (with the power to create matter by thought... 'the magic box') as the three-toed, original inhabitants of the island. Well, that's my theory anyway, Rachel doesn't buy it!
Next week: Dirty Dancing.
That is, indeed, a valid theory. One I would have supported before the season finale this year and the big reveal that they are, instead, stuck between dimensions. Or at least they *were* until they went "home" to the wrong dimension.
ReplyDeleteOf course that doesn't necessarily preclude the mechanism being the same one as in your theory...only the setting.
That's not how Rachel and I read the (season three) finale of Lost! Although it makes sense ... I guess :-)
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