I first saw Forbidden Planet when I was a kid, and I loved it. When I saw the DVD, I was a little worried, would it be as good as I remembered, or will it, like so many other film I’d loved, be so bad as to be unwatchable. Well, I’m pleased to say that it stands up to the test of time. Oh, the dialogue may sound a little dated, but the storyline and the artwork are perfect. It’s also an important film in the science fiction genre. There are no ‘aliens’ as such, no big laser battles, no big bug-eyed monsters jumping out at people. Instead, we have an intelligent film with characters that are believable and likeable. Its importance lies a great deal in the production values. The vast open vistas utilizing cinemascope, its color palette, not quite as saturated as some films, and its special effects, are all of a superior quality to most other science fiction films being made around that time. The movement of the flying saucer (this time peopled not with aliens bent on destruction, but by humans on a rescue mission) is almost flawless, with none of the wobble found in some of the contemporary films of the time. It went on to influence many other films and television series, not least the original Star Trek. In fact, at one point, the crew step on what appears to be the transporters from Trek.

It’s no secret that the plot has been lifted from Shakespeare’s ‘The Tempest’, and could be given an award for the strangest Shakespeare adaptation in cinema. It begins when a starship is sent to investigate the fate of a group of settlers on Altair-4, a planet some 17 light years from Earth. Commander J. J. Adams (Leslie Neilsen) and his crew discover just two survivors, Dr. Edward Morbius (Walter Pidgeon) and his daughter Altaira (Anne Francis). Morbius has discovered that the planet was once inhabited by a race of geniuses and wishes to study their ancient civilization and the vast superior technology that they left behind when they died. He has no desire to share his knowledge with Earth, and is reluctant to return. A big question remains unanswered. What killed the rest of the colony all those years before, and has it now returned?

It’s great to see Leslie Neilsen before the Police Squad days, when he was a romantic leading man / hero, and he holds his own with an actor as accomplished as Walter Pidgeon. But who is the star of Forbidden Planet? It has to be Robby the Robot, who went on to appear in many more films and television shows, which neatly brings me to the DVD extras. Robby appears in an episode of the TV series, ‘The Thin Man’ in which he is accused of murder. This episode appears on disk one, while on disk two, there is the film ‘The Invisible Boy’ where Robby and a young ten year old battle a supercomputer intent on controlling Earth. It’s an odd film, but amusing, especially in the way it parodies sit com families of the fifties. But if those two extras don’t hold that much interest for you, you do get a great hour long documentary ‘Watch The Skies!’ in which Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, James Cameron, and Ridley Scott discuss science fiction films of the fifties and how they were influenced by them. There are also two short documentaries about Forbidden Planet, ‘Amazing! Exploring the Far Reaches of Forbidden Planet’ and ‘Robby the Robot: Engineering a Science Fiction Icon’.

If you are a science fiction fan, you should have this two disk set in your collection.