One Paragraph Movie Review: Forbidden Planet

One hundred and fifty-seventh film: Forbidden Planet, a movie that starts with the phrase “In the final decade of the twenty-first century, men and women in rocket ships landed on the moon”. By a century later when this film is set, women have been relegated safely back to the twin responsibilities of housewifery and standing around in mini-skirts, and men are wearing smart slacks in a spaceship kitted out like an upmarket submarine. This movie was a 1956 trailblazer for big-budget science fiction that doesn’t compromise on special effects, complex alien civilisations or excellent servile robots. Cheesy and hokey as all get-out, the special effects — care of a borrowed Disney animator — are phenomenal for their time, and there’s undeniable pleasure in seeing how the technology a hundred years from now was imagined by people sixty-four years ago. As a bonus, the lead character Commander Adams is played by Leslie Nielsen, sincerely playing a character in a style he insincerely lampooned in most of his later roles. If you ignore the only woman in the cast being told that she’s asking for it dressing like that, this is a cracker. Three and a bit bourbon-replicating robots out of five.