THE ID FROM OUTER SPACE......WHY, 61 YEARS LATER, "FORBIDDEN PLANET" STILL RESONATES TODAY....

Forbidden Planet (1956)  still towers like a colossus over the multitudes of cheesy, tiny-budgeted science fiction movies that ran rampant through the 1950's. Lavishly produced and polished to a high gloss by MGM, the film's script cleverly reworked Shakespeare's "The Tempest " for its out-of-this-world adventure......that of a red-blooded all male space crew investigating a far flung colony of Earth scientists who've gone incommunicado. They find only three individuals left on the planet, the brilliant, cantankerous Dr.Morbius(Walter Pidgeon), his adorable daughter (Anne Francis)....and the amazing, instantly iconic Robby The Robot, somehow assembled by Morbius even though he has no scientific background in engineering or robotics.

            And how did Robby come about? That's our main topic here....we're not out to trumpet our deep love of this movie....it's already been exhaustively declared by millions of writers, bloggers and fans. What intrigues BQ more than ever about "Forbidden Planet"..... is.how it sticks in our mind every time we turn on the news....

            Back to Robby......Dr. Morbius, with a lot of time on his hands since his fellow explorer/colonists ended up ripped to shreds by an invisible, murderous  'planetary force', has increased his intellect to the point where constructing a wonder like Robby The Robot proved no more difficult than snapping together some Legos. He's accomplished this by discovering and absorbing the centuries-advanced technology left behind by the Krell, the long extinct mighty race who once ruled the now deserted planet. The Krell, as far as Morbius can surmise, wiped themselves out in one horrible night, undone by the massive machines they devised to boost their brain power to....uh....well, let's say Infinity and Beyond.

            The movie hinges on what decimated the Krell........the Id. In jacking up their IQs to the Nth power, the Krell unleashed the hidden, worst parts of their minds.....every base instinct, every vicious impulse, every psychotic animalistic thought not only escaped and ran free, but were given form and shape by the unlimited energy they generated.......in essence, the Krell combined suicide and genocide all in one final gory Armageddon.....

             Lately we've come think.....So that's how the Krell really died....they created the Internet, Reality TV, and Twitter.....Watching current events, we're starting to fear that we're living out the Krell's story......except in excruciating slow motion instead of one night. The gradual but inexorable loss of civility, the impulse to instantly lash out with whatever opinion pops into one's head,, the end of intelligent debate and discourse, the warping of truth into internal personal fantasy.....we've not only unleashed all our Ids, we've surrendered ourselves to a leader who's nothing but pure, unadulterated Id, with no thought for anything but itself.

            In "Forbidden Planet" the invisible  Monster From The Id, unwittingly born out of Morbius's own mind by his tinkering with Krell technology, finally manifests itself.  Brought to life by an animator lent to MGM by Walt Disney, the Id's a raging, roaring thing, stomping around,  consumed with hatred, looking to settle scores........sound familiar?

           To "Forbidden Planet" and its vividly memorable Id, we always award 5 stars (*****)....for the actual real life Id whose shadow we live under now.....no stars whatsoever.....only minus numbers.