Yar, you be here: Forbidden Planet > Customer Reviews

Forbidden Planet Customer Reviews (19 - 21 of 61 Reviews)

Forbidden Planet a classic !
When any list of great Science Fiction films is compiled "Forbidden Planet" will always rank near the top. It is also represents a unique collaboration between MGM and Disney studios. Disney providing much of the out of this world landscapes and Labs. It's sometimes hard to remember this was all done at a time when computers themselves were "high science fiction". This accounts for much of the "cartoon like" look of the film which in its time was totally convincing wonderfully detailed world(maybe a little dated today).
Much of what sets "Forbidden Planet" aparts from anything before or after is the work of Louis & Bebe Baron "Sound Tonalities" what amounts and "Electronic Music" and effects track. Ground breaking to say the least. This is in a day before transitors were common.

As one watchs the film it's extremely hard to believe that this was more than a decade before "Startrek", "2001" and "Starwars".
But,its all here, Communicators, faster than light space travel and robots! Of special note is the much loved Robby the Robot.

The Tempest script device is an excellent one as is Walter Pidgeon as the Magician. I do find it somewhat troubling that the script tries to be both adult Scifi drama while also appearing juvenile at times. It's almost as if there are two different films here.
(example: Earl Hollimans (comedy relief) Cooky, are those really tin pots and pans?)
An other problem is some of the dialogue sounds clipped! Leading me to believe the film once ran much longer than todays (cut for time and double billing) 99 minutes. Some of these edits are included in the earlier Criterion Laser Disc of Forbidden Planet.

All in all this is perhaps the best of 1950's Scifi Films. It has been long neglected as a DVD. I can only hope there is a new restoration with commentary and other extras in the works.




Forbidden Planet A True Classic
It was very nice to be able to order Forbidden Planet from Amazon, but more importantly, this movie is a TRUE Sci-Fi classic. Young and old should watch this together. Robby The Robot to this day still permeates our society as what a robot is and can do for man. Usage of humor, the lack of bad language and a great story equates this movie to one of the all time greats.

after a million years of shining sanity, they could hardly have understood what power was destroying them
Forbidden Planet is first in rank in a great tradition of sci fi classics. Three other films which belong in its company is the original version of The Fly, The Day the Earth Stood Still, and The Time Machine.

All of these films deal with variations on the "Copernican" theme of seeing the earth as a speck of dust in the cosmos. But they do so in a way full of human drama; they explore the struggle and crises faced by individual human beings as they come into contact with and/or to terms with some "truth" which is larger than human life. The Incredible Shrinking Man of the same period, and Altered States, from the `80s, might be reckoned in the same tradition.

Yet Forbidden Planet outdoes them all from a sci-fi point of view. This is the story of an alien race whose state of ultimate technology outlives the race itself, and of a handful of deep space explorers from earth who gradually come to realize, both by carefully studying the alien artifacts, and from their own interpersonal exchanges, that this is destiny of humanity as well. This is not, however, a story about technology turning on its creators, as dealt with in a good number of other films. This film pursues its theme without technology in any way becoming the bad guy or the bogey man. The plot is far more subtle, and far more powerful. In fact, there are no villains in this film, at least not in any conventional sense. There are no cowboys and Indians here, mechanical or otherwise.

The unique special effects and musical score make this film a special treat. They captivate the imagination in a way that really does justice to its plot. Especially memorable is the film's rendition of a piece of recorded music left behind by the alien race, the mood of which echoes through the entire sound track-though the music only lasts a minute or so. Also memorable are the visual shots of seemingly ant-sized human beings as they explore the inner world of the great machines, where arcs of electricity the size of lightning bolts are incidental parts of its routine maintenance (reducing lightning to the status of a little static cling being automatically discharged).

A must see for sci fi fans; thoughtful and fun for any viewer.

Previous Page

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21

Next Page