Lobby poster for Forbidden Planet (1956)Casting About for Excuses
Back on board the space cruiser, Doc Ostrow hauls over a heavy plaster cast of one of the footprints found outside the grounds. Commander Adams takes one look at the gruesome object and can’t believe his eyes. If THIS is what did Chief Quinn in, Adams posits, well, then, it’s highly conceivable, in his rational skipper’s mind, that he could have beaten this creature to a pulp with a club, or certainly killed it with one of their blasters.
Not feasible, replies Doc. In his view, the plaster footprint “runs counter to every law of adaptive evolution.” He indicates the varying structural components, which point to a four-footed animal. However, the thing that attacked Quinn left tracks of a biped, that is, a two-legged beastie. And that disgusting-looking claw that sticks out. Why, it’s got to belong to a burrowing creature, or “some impossible tree sloth” or other. No “rational” explanation exists for this being — at least, not yet. Doc is perplexed, and so is the commander. Surely, somebody would have noticed this walking nightmare.
Lt. Farman ushers in the cook, who, contrary to the skipper’s belief and conviction, provides him and Robby the Robot with an airtight alibi: the mechanical being was with the besotted Cookie the entire time he was imbibing. Great! That leaves only one prime suspect, the same one that they (and any reasonably intelligent viewer) have suspected all along, namely Professor Morbius.
Adams hints to the others that he and Doc should swing by that old Krell lab and take the test of their IQ abilities for themselves, damn the consequences. The commander’s eagerness to do so, which would betray a trust, no doubt was fueled by: (1) his desire to complete his mission; but more importantly, (2) to get to the bottom of what’s going on in this Forbidden Planet.
In the succeeding scene, Morbius and Altaira observe the burial detail of Quinn’s funeral from afar. Even out here in space, a million or more miles from home, the C-57D’s crew keeps their earthly observances intact with a brief bible reading by the officer in charge (in keeping to their religious affiliation, of course, the last vestige of humanity in a so-called “civilized” society).
The Professor warns Adams of more deaths to come. But how does he know this? What is it that gives the philologist such insight into the unknown? Morbius pauses before he answers. He calls it a “premonition” of disaster. But to the skipper, it smacks of an ultimatum, i.e., the same kind of provocation that Morbius posed upon their approach to Altair IV. Only this time, it was spoken with purpose and deliberation.
That night, the skipper and his anxious crew make preparations for a possible attack. They test their alarm system by activating the main batteries. In the midst of the test, the commander calls Lt. Farman over to say that he’s sorry to have been so hard on him. Farman stops him in his tracks by admitting that Alta “picked the right man” after all. In other words, let bygones be bygones. All’s fair in love and war, right? The two rivals smile knowingly at each other. Good thing, too! For brother, are these guys in for a REAL battle!
No sooner have the men mended their frazzled friendship, when word comes that radar has picked up something on the horizon. A huge blip on the screen, “Big as a house,” now materializes. The skipper has his batteries fire full blast into the arroyo, and for a moment there’s a deathly silence, except for those electronic tonalities that mimic the invisible Id monster’s footsteps. Suddenly, and without warning, the Id monster attacks, a dazzling FX sequence animated by Joshua Meador, one of Disney Studios’ best effects men. At nearly four minutes’ duration, this is the film’s centerpiece and main action episode.
The Id monster’s outline emits an eerie blue light when it first crosses the beams. When confronting the crew, however, its blue glow turns bright red with fiery rage — an irate fiend (much like the Bengal tiger before it) that roars and hollers its lust for vengeance to the winds. Doc yells out the obvious: “The blasted thing’s invisible!” The Id’s loathsome mouth is agape. It would seem that the jaws of Hell itself have been pried open, standing ready to maim and destroy — a horrifying apparition of dread and foreboding.
Original concept art for the Id monster gave it an insect-like appearance. The bug idea transmogrified into “a bulky, creeping mass … meant to be a literal nightmare, the physical equivalent of the warped, primal urges of Morbius’ subconscious mind from which the Id monster sprang” (Clarke and Rubin, “Making ‘Forbidden Planet’,” Cinefantastique, p. 35, Vol. 8, No. 2, 1979). When that too was rejected, the producers turned to Josh Meador, who hired freelance animator Ken Hultgren, someone outside MGM and Disney, “to get a fresh approach on the problem. Hultgren, whose only assignment was to come up with a workable Id concept, developed the image of a roaring beast’s head with piercing eyes” (Ibid., Cinefantastique, p. 35).
The resemblance of the Id monster to MGM’s Leo the Lion trademark has been noted and accounted for. In our estimation, however, there is an uncanny likeness to Morbius himself (down to the hairs on his chinny-chin-chin). This makes perfect sense in purely psychological terms. After all, we are dealing with the Professor’s internal state of mind, one he has kept under wraps for almost the entirety of picture. Moreover, Morbius will soon be revealed as the “man behind the curtain,” the manipulator of the act that led to the death of so many of his former shipmates — and possibly the demise of the C-57D.
Speaking of which, the space crew’s handheld blasters have no effect on the beast. One crewman gets crushed by the Id monster’s giant claw. Another crewman gets swatted to the side like an annoying fly. Seeing his hearty shipmates go down about him, Farman bravely (or recklessly, depending on one’s perspective) steps up before the thing and takes dead aim at its evil eyes. Adams shouts for his crew to hold their fire. Unfortunately, the Id monster grabs hold of Farman in its vice-like grip and casually hurls him aloft to his death.
Adams gives the order to continue firing at the target. The monster is still enraged, its menace unabated. But it makes no further attempts at mayhem.
The Sleep of Reason
Morbius, asleep in the Krell laboratory, fidgets in agitated slumber, with the gauges of the Krell’s plastic educator machine blinking at full tilt. In direct imitation and remembrance of Spanish artist Francisco Goya’s famously suggestive lithograph, “The Sleep of Reason Brings Forth Monsters,” Morbius is roused from his nap by daughter Alta’s piercing screams. She bursts into the lab, relaying to Morbius her terrifying vision of the creature as it attacked the space camp.
As Morbius awakens, the Id monster disappears. Alta continues to relate her dream to her consoling father. “Now, now,” Morbius reassures her. “You know a dream can’t hurt you.” Alta tries her best to exact a promise from Morbius that he will protect her lover Adams from harm. But the crafty philologist can give no such guarantee. “I’m completely helpless,” he wrongly tells her, “as long as he remains here so willfully.”
Back at the camp, Adams tries to lift his men’s spirits with a pronouncement that the ship’s main battery stopped the monster’s forward motion. Doc shoots down his statement with a terse, “You believe that?” Not really, is Adams’ honest comeback. He knows it will return. But he turns to Doc for an adequate explanation of what they witnessed before them: Is it possible an invisible being can survive a blast of atomic fission, and not get disintegrated in the process? A scientific impossibility is Doc’s reply.
“Hypnotic illusions don’t’ tear people apart!” Adams retorts. But then we have Doc’s educated estimation of the matter: “Any organism dense enough to survive three billion volts would have to be made of solid nuclear material. It would sink of its own weight to the center of this planet.” He goes on to press his case by insisting the beast “must have been renewing its molecular structure from one microsecond to the next.” Meaning, it cannot be destroyed by either conventional or advanced means. Something else must be propelling it.
Adams hollers for the tractor and tells Doc that they will take Alta and Morbius back with them by force if necessary, citing regulations. However, Doc throws another wrench into the works by reminding his single-minded commanding officer of what happened to the Bellerophon when it tried to leave the planet. Adams has a snappy rejoinder to that one, too: “Which makes it a gilt-edged priority that one of us [meaning himself, naturally] gets into that Krell lab and takes that brain boost.”
Adams gives the order to abandon the planet the second their force field starts to short circuit. The bosun (George Wallace) relays his order to the crew as Adams and Doc take off. Upon their arrival at Morbius’ home, Adams insists to Doc that HE will be the one to take the Krell mind test, no questions asked. Doc plays dumb for the time being (clearly, the audience is keyed in to the ploy that Ostrow will be the one who gets the jump on his commanding officer — a bit of foreshadowing of events).
Finding their way barred by Robby the Robot, the duo manages to sneak back into the house with Alta’s interference. While the skipper tries to alert the girl to the dangers of staying put, Doc sneaks off to take the mind boost. Barely alive, he is brought in by Robby (we can perceive the “invisible” strings that hold him up). Robby deposits the doctor onto the living room couch. Egged on by the skipper, Doc boasts of his “new mind. Up there in lights. Bigger than his now.” Adams admonishes him to take it easy, but Doc knows he is done for.
Ostrow blurts out that the big machine was the Krell’s crowning glory: “A true creation.” However, that all-but divine race forgot one key factor. Giving his last order, Adams forces the truth out of his wounded comrade: “Monsters, John, monsters from the Id!” With those words, Doc dies in the commander’s arms. Adams is clueless as to what the doctor meant, so he will solicit Morbius’ views for clarification.
Just then, Morbius bursts in. He sees the couple entwined in a tender embrace. But his only reaction is to the man who defied his orders not to toy around with the Krell machinery. “The fool, the meddling idiot! As though his ape’s brain could contain the secrets of the Krell.” Way to go, Prof! Alta tries to reason with the old man by pointing out that Doc is dead. Have a little sympathy for the deceased. But his only consideration is that Doc was warned. He paid the price for (chuckle, chuckle) tampering in God’s domain. “Let him be buried with the other victims of human greed and folly.”
For the first time in her short life, Alta sees her “loving and caring” father for what he is: a malicious, unfeeling being. She reminds him that Morbius wanted her to make a choice (this is a snippet of dialog that refers to an earlier excised scene in the original script). Alta has chosen to runaway with the handsome commander, come what may. She darts off to get her things.
However, Morbius is on a different wavelength altogether. “My daughter is planning a very foolish action, and she’ll be terribly punished,” he solemnly invokes.
In the middle of this family feud, Adams repeats to himself the meaning of what Doc Ostrow meant by the Id. “Monsters from the subconscious. Of course!” Though the skipper’s intellect is nowhere near the philologist’s capacity for knowledge and understanding (as we learned from early on in the feature), nor is it close to the late doctor’s “bigger than his” brainwaves, Adams is able to reason out the facts from the limited number of possibilities.
He applies the principles of critical thinking in order to arrive at the only logical conclusion to their and the Krell’s dilemma: “Creation from mere thought. The beast, the mindless primitive!” So that’s what killed the Krell. They had “access to a machine that could never be shut down. The secret devil of every soul on the planet, all set free at once to loot and maim, and take revenge and kill!” Yikes!!!
Morbius is unconvinced by this line of reasoning, due mostly to his observation that too many centuries have passed since the last Krell kicked the proverbial bucket. Yet there is still a living, breathing monster on the prowl. How does one explain that? Adams starts to lose patience with the Professor.
We Interrupt This Program
Robby interrupts their colloquy with a grave warning that something is approaching. “It is quite near.” Morbius charges Robby to stop the menace that this way comes, but the robot is unable to carry out his instructions. “That thing out there,” Adams insists. “It’s you.” But isn’t the fair Altaira immune to its power? Not a chance! “She’s joined herself to me!” Body and soul!
Morbius hurls his frustrations at the pair. “Say it’s a lie. Let it hear you! Tell it you don’t love this man!” Altaira remains defiant. Alert viewers may or may not have picked up on the incestuous implications of a father-daughter-lover triangle, another jab at the analyst’s couch. This nod to 1950s pop psychology was one of several indicated in the script. In fact, you could say that Freud’s oedipal complex enjoyed free reign in this production.
“Stop it, Robby!” Morbius cries. “Don’t let it in! Kill it!” Regrettably, Robby’s circuits give out and shut down. (This was previously indicated in the scene where Morbius instructs Robby to fire Adams’ blaster between his eyes.) You see, Morbius himself is outside the door. And, by the Three Laws of Robotics (as established by visionary science-fiction author Isaac Asimov) Robby is prevented from harming another human being — in this instance, the hapless Professor.
The trio manages to flee into the Krell lab (the wrong spot to seek shelter at a time like this), with the Id monster in literal hot pursuit. Adams jumbles the combination to the entranceway so as to thwart the approaching brute. With the two men wrestling for control of the situation, the disclosures come out fast and furious: that Morbius had inadvertently sent the Id monster out to seek and destroy his crewmates. Worst of all, he’s “whistled up the monster again” to punish Alta “for her disloyalty and disobedience.”
As if to illustrate his point, Adams tells Morbius to look at the gauges supplying the Id monster with whatever power it needs to reach its target. Next, he motions to the red-hot Krell-metal door that separates the pursuer from the pursued (a gesture that visionary filmmaker George Lucas paid homage to in Star Wars, Episode I: The Phantom Menace). The door starts to melt away, allowing the monster access to the laboratory from whence it hailed.
In the riveting climax to the drama, Morbius realizes that he is the guilty party; that he was complicit in the murder of his shipmates; and that his evil self is tapping (to quote from Edgar Allan Poe’s The Raven) at their chamber door. But what can he do to prevent that evil from entering? Not much, I’m afraid! Even though the beast is supposed to be unseen, according to the Cinefantastique article, “it was always planned to make the Id visible eventually because … you can’t tease an audience forever. The original screenplay also called for the Id to become visible … after it breaks through the Lab door.”
This is patently nonsensical. The monster can’t possibly be seen at this juncture because that would require the presence of a force field (as proven in the Id monster’s nighttime attack). Fortunately, the idea was abandoned, since “the screenplay provides no real explanation for [the Id monster’s] visibility,” even though “its appearance at this point makes the scene much more dramatic and less confusing.”
Well, “confusing” to some individuals incapable of following along with the plot, but not to those who have been paying attention. The fact that it was brought up at all as a conceivable option shows how even experienced writers such as Irving Block and Allen Adler could be on the wrong side of storytelling.
In order to save his daughter and her lover from the same fate, Morbius confronts the terrible presence and shouts his defiance at it: “Stop! No further! I deny you! I give you up!” Without delay, the big machine comes to noisy halt as the evil menace is thwarted. The lab falls silent.
Alta turns away from the spectacle of a parent wrestling with his demons. The battle won, Morbius lies helpless on the floor. Alta cradles him in her lap. With his last breath, the Professor charges Adams with throwing the switch. The couple must be a million miles in space as the Krell’s blast furnaces will set off a chain reaction — an irreversible course that will consume what’s left of the planet and the Krell’s technology. With that, Morbius expires, his daughter’s name on his lips.
Once United Planets Space Cruiser C-57D has attained the mandatory distance, an incredible bright light envelops the scope that Alta and Adams are viewing, signaling that the brave new world of Altair IV is no more. On board the ship, Robby the Robot has been brought back to life (with the same soothing tones of actor Marvin Miller), indicative of man’s ability to repair his machines for future use. The scene of Alta and Commander Adams’ wedding, which was part of a working print and is of instructive interest to film historians, scholars, and students of the sci-fi genre, was edited out of the release print.
Copyright © 2018 by Josmar F. Lopes
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