Forbidden Planet (1956)

Cast includes:
CHARACTER	ACTOR/ACTRESS	RATING
Dr. Edward Morbius	Walter Pidgeon	½
Altaira Morbius	Anne Francis	½
Commander John J. Adams	Leslie Nielsen
Lt. Doc Ostrow	Warren Stevens
Lt. Jerry Farman	Jack Kelly

Review

The luscious Forbidden Planet combines B-movie acting and romance with eerie and intelligent science fiction into arguably the genre's best of its time. The premise is largely taken from Shakespeare's The Tempest, albeit moving it into space - more precisely to the planet Altair-4 - it resembles the earth, but has a green sky and violet ground. The special effects and miniatures are fantastic, even if the studio backgrounds are blurry paintings and devour some of the effect. Still, the film is as seductive as anything appearing later in the genre's lifetime. It has clever, if simple, characterisations, one of few non-annoying robots in film history and, more importantly, a thought-provoking and philosophical script that holds up until the very end. I've always maintained that good science fiction should make you ponder its thesis long after the end titles. Unfortunately, this is not something every filmmaker throughout history has been able to live up to. But Forbidden Planet has perhaps its best asset in exactly that department. The film deserves its reputation, and its futuristic vision is, in retrospect, a delightful combination of remarkable ideas and amusing underestimation. Allegedly, the humans reached the moon in the first decade of the 21th century.