Touches You

A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.

Great movie. Not sure what people expected but I found it highly entertaining.

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

A real nice classic piece here - Forbidden Planet is sci-fi pulp fiction forged into a movie, on top we get Leslie "Naked Gun" Nielsen in his very young days. Like the The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) and The War of the Worlds (1953), Forbidden Planet is a real iconic sci-fi flick of the 50s.

The "flux" scene is very early on, and the crew has to stand under a display which looks very similar to Star Trek's transporter. They are turned inside out and back again and it is very startling. It is "panned to the side" and not shown in even my official MGM DVD copy. While the movie is fascinating and even humorous (Robbie the Robot) the electronic music is somewhat cloying and annoying at times. Note the unintentionally funny final scene in the film when Leslie Nelsen almost "cracks up" as he hugs our beautiful heroine, Anne Francis. Amazing animation that is so precise that it appears as moving mattes. Yes, Disney Studios did it (with supervision) "credited" to them. The "ID monster" terrified me when I saw this film as a child at an "MGM Kiddie Matinee" on a really big screen. According to the script, even the tiger is an" illusion" powered by Dr. Morbius' mind. The monster materializes only once (that I remember) while "caught" in a beam of light. Obviously, Gene Roddenberry "borrowed" several ideas for his "Star Trek" series decades later.

It is just frustrating to think of what Forbidden Planet could have achieved with its stunning visuals. Some of the scenes are unprecedented with an epic scale, and Robbie feels like a real robot. However, the director's incapability of storytelling and character design makes this film a total mess. Now I am not saying the storytelling should be as the way it is now, since it is a rather old film; however, even Gone with the Wind, which is older than this film, uses more intricate storytelling techniques. Therefore time is not an excuse. Most of the story is presented verbally, and not in a good way. The entire Quinn history is narrated, by an actor who is quite terrible at reading lines. This is still okay though since we are constantly introduced to novelties of the Quinn visually and the film sure has some good set design and sound effects crew. When it comes to the third act, however, the film grows into a total dumpster. Acting goes phenomenally bad, along with some of the worst lines I have seen in a while. Dr. Morbius also died for no reason, at least I did not get how he died. And do not even mention the self-destruction system: pulling the disk and turning off the switch... Seriously? This seems a bit too easy and caution less for a SELF-DESTRUCTION sequence don't you think? Another problem is the character design. It is annoying to see how the director and writers seem to not care about the characters at all. The main character, the skipper dude, is so unlikable. I am not blaming the actor for this, though he is also terrible at the third act, but he is just so blunt and I cannot care less about him. And here is a thing: if the main character is characterless and unlikable, the audience automatically turns to someone who has some character, good or evil, and in this case Dr. Morbius, who, though being an egocentric murderer, still seems more of a human than the captain, and is therefore more relatable! As a matter of fact I just wanted the monster to kill everyone except for Morbius at the end, because all the other characters are just worthless and stupid. And then we come to Altaira. At first I thought maybe the daughter is so characterless because she is a robot, so that it is also kind of a twist, right? But no, she is just characterless because the writing is bad and lazy. Oh don't forget the romance. We get this cliché exotic girl who knows nothing about sexual experiences though she is a human and studies biology. That I can be sold if I have to, but her romance with Morbius? What? So this girl kisses one of the crew members, and the captain stops it, and the girl just falls in love with him? Just WHAT? Is there anything I missed out, or is this movie so lazy and bad that it just includes a love affair to sell tickets? I can see someone enjoying this. I enjoyed it a bit for Robbie's sake. I mean, can you believe it, the robot gets the most characterization in the entire film!

This is a must see landmark film for any fan of classic sci-fi. A with an ingenious and intelligent plot line, and effects that were ahead of its time. This 1956 adaptation of Shakespeare's "The Tempest" paved the way for the future of the science fiction film genre. Sometimes monsters hide where you least expect them.