"MOVIE MAD" by Michael van den Bos

Asa Butterfield on time in Martin Scorsese's HUGO

HUGO – Directed by Martin Scorsese 

Rating: 4.5 out of 5 Chaplins.

{Opens Wednesday 23 November 2011}

Who would have thought that Martin Scorsese – the director who made such intense, violent and searing adult films as Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, Goodfellas, Casino, The Gangs of New York and The Departed – had the tender and graceful touch to create an enchanting and magical family film, and display a deft flair for 3-D?  Scorsese does just that with great aplomb in his new movie, Hugo.   Like a master illusionist who can awe an audience with skillful feats of legerdemain, Scorsese once again proves why he is a master filmmaker: Hugo captivates the imagination, weaves a web of wonder and reverberates with the love of the movies because Scorsese’s passion for movies and its history glows from every frame of this lovely film.   

Hugo (Asa Butterfield) is a 12-year-old wily orphan who lives in the walls and rafters of a Paris railway station (evoking another Hugo, the French author Victor Hugo, who’s Quasimodo, from his novel, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, lives a lonely life within the sanctuary of Paris’s great cathedral) in the early 1930s. Hugo keeps the station’s many clocks properly wound, in repair and always on time, a skill he learned from his late father (Jude Law).  Hugo’s alcoholic Uncle Claude (which is another allusion to The Hunchback of Notre Dame, as Claude is name of the Archdeacon of Notre Dame who rescues and adopts Quasimodo), who adopted Hugo after the tragic death of the boy’s father, unloads his horologist job at the railway station to his nephew and all but abandons Hugo to drink.

Like a mouse living within walls, Hugo scampers through the infrastructure of the station, spying on the commuter activity and the shops of the station from the many hidden windows built into the clocks, searching for opportunities to scurry into public for stealing food and other necessary sundries.  Hugo is also in search of mechanical parts in order to fix an automaton – a mechanical man – that he inherited from his father, who in turn acquired it from a source who got it from an enigmatic figure.  If Hugo can repair the automaton and find the heart-shaped key that will turn it on, Hugo believes a secret will be unlocked left by his father.  When Hugo attempts to steal a mechanical toy, for its parts, from a toyshop in the railway station, the shop owner, an elderly man (Ben Kingsley), catches Hugo in his thievery, which begins an intertwining of both their lives in unexpected ways.  Hugo will befriend the toyshop owner’s goddaughter, Isabelle (Chloë Grace Moretz), and with her help, they will discover that her godfather is the real French pioneer filmmaker, the magician of the movies, Georges Méliès, a forgotten artist of cinema who is now living in obscurity.  Hugo will go through an adventure of discovery that will profoundly affect himself and Méliès.

Director Martin Scorsese on the set of HUGO

Martin Scorsese is not only one of the greatest living film directors, he is also a film historian and a vital participant in the arena of film restoration and preservation.  He has made two essential documentaries about film history: A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American Movies and My Voyage to Italy (an intimate and richly detailed exploration of Italian Cinema).  Scorsese also appears in countless documentaries, made by other filmmakers, discussing a variety of film history topics.  Hugo is redolent with Scorsese’s passion for film history and it is one of the driving forces of its narrative, as adapted by screenwriter John Logan from the award-wining novel, The Invention of Hugo Cabret, by Brian Selznick. 

Hugo takes Isabelle to the movies for her first time; her Papa Georges and his wife, Jeanne (Helen McCrory), forbid her from attending the cinema.   The kids see the classic 1923 Harold Lloyd comedy, Safety Last!, and Isabelle is on the edge of her seat in suspense as Lloyd climbs the outside walls of a Los Angeles building and then hangs from the minute hand of a large clock.  This is one of the iconic images of silent cinema and we see the ecstatic delight it – and therefore all the great silent films – had on the original audiences of this era through Isabelle and Hugo’s reactions.  Later in Hugo, Scorsese successfully reimagines Lloyd hanging from the clock when Hugo finds himself hanging for his dear life during a chase scene.  

Other clips and images from silent cinema permeate Hugo, including snippets from D.W. Griffith’s monumental 1916 epic, Intolerance; Robert Wiene’s 1919 German Expressionist horror film, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari; and clips of Charlie Chaplin, to name a few.  The Lumière Brothers of France were pioneer filmmakers – they were the first to project movies on the big screen – and in Hugo we see clips of some of their short films (known as “actualités”, a primitive form of documentary, usually one-minute in running time), including their famous 1895 film, The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station. This Lumière film shows a train heading towards the movie camera, thus enlarging on screen rapidly.  Supposedly, the original audiences of this film panicked and ducked when they saw the train rushing towards them.  Scorsese creates his own version of the Lumière train shot in a remarkably vivid sequence that is the logical extension of what audiences imagined they saw back in 1895.  This sequence also draws inspiration from an actual train derailment the same year at Gare Montparnasse in Paris.

Scorsese profoundly manifests his reverence for film history through the character of Georges Méliès, movingly portrayed by Ben Kingsley.  Méliès was a French magician who became obsessed with the movies in the medium’s embryonic years.  He is arguably the first film pioneer to tell narrative stories and he is noted as the father of cinematic trick effects, most famous for his imaginative and beautifully art directed (Méliès designed and painted his sets) fantasy films.  His most famous and influential work is the first science-fiction film, A Trip to the Moon (Le Voyage dans la lune – 1902), loosely adapted from the Jules Verne novel, which contains one of cinema’s most famous images, a bullet-shaped rocketship crashing into the eye of the moon.  A Trip to the Moon is imaginatively integral to Hugo’s plot and its moon image a thematic motif.

A Trip to the Moon (Le Voyage dans la lune – 1902), directed by Georges Méliès

Scorsese’s most stunning work in Hugo comes in the loving, affectionate recreation of Méliès filmmaking years when the magician realized magical dreams on film in his Montreuil glass-walled studio.  These scenes are an important reminder of the early romance and adventure of filmmaking when the marvellous potential for the medium was being discovered for the first time in its nascent period.   Hugo, if nothing else, is a love letter to the movies.

Scorsese’s use of 3-D technology is remarkably sublime.  He never goes for the cheap in-your-face shots for the sake of the effect.  He uses 3-D to envelop the audience in the film’s environment, to embrace the characters, to enhance the drama.  The 3-D in Hugo is always subordinate to the story.  I have not been a fan of 3-D movies, but kudos to Scorsese for using the generally eye-thumping technique with the sensibilities of an artist and skilled storyteller.

If there is a flaw to find in Hugo, it is in the titular character.  Asa Butterfield is appropriately dramatic, in a subdued way, but he comes off too cold, too distant, and too withdrawn.  This problem stems from how the character was written, performed or directed (probably a result of all three).  These personality characteristics are all appropriate for Hugo, who leads a lonely, insular life, but his character arc is severely lacking and he remains an aloof character to the end.  It is only when Georges Méliès becomes more prominent in the film (about halfway though) that Hugo warms up and achieves a pathos that is so poignant, particularly when the notion of losing our purpose in life makes us kind of broken, is revealed as the theme at the heart of the movie. Ben Kingsley conveys such a delicate sincerity as a broken artist that this role will surely rank among his finest performances.

Ben Kingsley as Georges Méliès

All the supporting performers are warm, engaging, humorous and human, especially Sacha Baron Cohen as the station inspector hobbled by one mechanically supported leg, who is also Hugo’s main nemesis, and Emily Mortimer as Lisette, the pretty flower shop owner that the station inspector is sweet on.  Chloë Grace Moretz as Isabelle, the young girl who helps Hugo on his journey, is a lovely presence.  Jude Law, Ray Winstone and Christopher Lee (as a helpful bookstore owner) have little screen time and feel wasted for such strong actors, but I suspect they had additional scenes that were cut from the final film. 

Hugo is bravura filmmaking, a visually resplendent picture and a most original, entertaining, and ultimately rewarding family fantasy film that is among the best of the genre, standing tall with The Wizard of Oz, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and the Harry Potter movies.  Martin Scorsese and his creative team have put on screen something rare these days: a sense of wonder and enchantment wrapped in a dazzling display of technique wedded intrinsically to a delightful story, while teaching audiences about forgotten yet essential film history.  Hugo, like every other film in cinema history steeped in the fantastic, owes its legacy to works of Georges Méliès.   That Scorsese can remind us of this history and make a wonderful entertainment for all ages is an awesome magic trick that would make the old French illusionist proud.

Georges Méliès: Magician of the Movies

HUGO trailer

Saoirse Ronan is Hanna

HANNA – directed by Joe Wright

Rating: 4 out of 5 Chaplins.

{Opens in Vancouver theatres on Friday 08 April 2011}

Hooray for Hanna!  Here is an action-adventure movie that shockingly has brains, wry wit, a surprising soul, is artfully directed and pulsates with an electric edge.  Hanna, the titular character, is the most exciting and fascinating new action hero to hit movie screens in several years.  Stupendously played by Saoirse Ronan, Hanna is the 16-year-old female flip side of Jason Bourne: a lethal killer at a loss for her true identity.  As improbable as the plot is, Hanna is no super amped-up comic book action movie with its lead actress sealed in skin tight, low- cut outfits and firing semi-automatic weapons while never scuffing her stiletto pumps.  Hanna Heller (don’t think the screenwriters didn’t know what they were doing when they gave her that last name) is a vulnerable teenage girl, and like most teenagers, she is struggling to find herself, understand her identity, and come to grips with growing-up in a dangerous world, even if she can break your neck with one swift twist of your head.

Meticulously trained by her ex-CIA agent father, Erik Heller (Eric Bana), in the frigid countryside of North Finland, Hanna’s killer instincts and survival skills are honed to a razor’s edge.  Erik also educates Hanna in various languages and world history.  The only nod to anything representing a childhood for Hanna is her love of reading fairy tales.  All of this deadly training is for one purpose – a mysterious mission, and when Hanna is ready to take on this mission, her father activates a tracking device that calls the attention of steely-cold CIA operative Marissa Wiegler (Cate Blanchett), who sends forces to Erik’s cabin.  He is nowhere to be found, but they capture Hanna and she is brought to a secret CIA base in Morocco for interrogation.  Marissa is somehow connected to Hanna’s past and Hanna’s mission is connected to Marissa.  In a brilliantly conceived and executed break-out scene, Hanna escapes and finds herself lost in North Africa.  She comes to the attention of a Bohemian English family travelling in a van and they kindly help Hanna, but unknowingly put themselves in danger for doing so as Hanna is followed by Marissa’s sadistic henchman, Issacs (Tom Hollander).  Hanna’s enigmatic past is revealed when she meets her father at a Berlin rendezvous point where Marissa has tracked her down, culminating in a haunting girl-on-girl final confrontation.

What separates and elevates Hanna from your typical sound-and-fury Hollywood action movie is its very human subtext of a motherless, missed childhood in the guise of the teenage Hanna, who is moulded by her father in an image of his design for a vengeful purpose, and, albeit, for reasons so she can actually have a future.  This is all wrapped in a dream-like treatment with overt allusions to classic fairy tales.  There is no missing Little Red Riding Hood and the Big Bad Wolf or the relationship of Snow White and her wicked stepmother in the form of Cate Blanchett’s Marrisa Wiegler.  Director Joe Wright (The Soloist, Atonement) and his production design team create a fairy tale look in the beautiful opening sequences set in North Finland.  The home of Hanna and her father looks like a cottage the Seven Dwarfs would live in and the ethereal quality is only enhanced with the snowy atmosphere.  This fairy tale design is mirrored later on in a surreal, abandoned amusement park for the climax of the movie.  It is in this location where director Wright is bold enough to incorporate an astonishing image of Cate Blanchett and the oversized head of the Big Bad Wolf with gaping maw.

Joe Wright’s direction is confident, assured, stylish; never heavy-handed, confused or ostentatious.  How wonderful it is to watch an action movie that is made with loving detail to craft and graced with a touch of the poetic.  Wright, and his editor, Paul Tothill, respect the audience by not bludgeoning them with machine-gun editing and a barrage of thunderous noise.  The action scenes are tough, blunt, thrilling and scary while never punishing to the senses.  I was impressed by one particular fight scene between Eric Bana’s character and the CIA agents surrounding him for capture.  It is filmed in one continuous moving camera shot with not cuts.  You feel the urgency, the immediacy and the danger of this hand-to-hand combat scene based on expert choreographed stunt work photographed in an uninterrupted take.  This is rare to see in contemporary action films where fight scenes are cut-up in a mess of abstract movement.  Cinematographer Alwin H. Kuchler photographs the movie with a keen sense of how the contrast of cool and warm light and expressive colour conveys Hanna’s feelings and senses. 

Sonically driving Hanna’s adventure is one of the best non-symphonic contemporary music scores I have heard in recent years.  The Chemical Brothers contribute an original electronic music score that crackles and roars with an eccentric grace without feeling disconnected to the story.  The score makes a nod to film history when a musical suite called “In the Hall of The Mountain King”,  from the 19th Century stage play Peer Gynt, is featured on the soundtrack, evoking Fritz Lang’s 1931 German Expressionist film, M, in which Peter Lorre’s child killer whistles that same tune whenever he hunts for his next victim.

The acting is generally superb throughout Hanna.  Eric Bana as Hanna’s father is understated and solid, if not given a lot to do.  Tom Hollander as Issacs, the nefarious henchman, is wonderfully despicable.  He looks like Perez Hilton with bleached blonde hair, but with skills more deadly than the lacerating celebrity reportage of the internet gossip monger.

The stand-out performances are Cate Blanchett and Saoirse Ronan.  Blanchett is across-the board outstanding in any role she takes on.  In Hanna she combines a subtly scary gravitas with fleeting moments of vulnerability.  In one brilliant turn – that you may miss if you blink – Marissa is interrogating Hanna’s grandmother (more Red Riding Hood metaphors) and when the grandmother mentions to Marissa that she could not possibly understand the bond between mother and daughter, Blanchett reacts in the slightest manner that massively betrays her character’s imperturbability.  This brief moment reveals that Marrisa may harbour some history and pain connected to Hanna.  It is, ironically, a moment where a nugget of sympathy is suddenly engendered for this villainess character and it swiftly deepens her mystery as much as Hanna’s.

Saoirse Ronan gives a simply breathtaking, heartfelt and powerhouse performance as the perfectly trained assassin who must “adapt or die”.  Her fragile, pale figure suggests a tenuous young girl, which emotionally she is, but she is as nimble as a spider monkey and as dangerous as a wolverine.  Ronan elicits a multitude of complex emotions, striking delicate notes of fear, longing, sexual awakening and kick-ass assurance.  She was the lone good thing about Peter Jackson’s pretentious 2009 allegorical misfire, The Lovely Bones, and in Hanna she proves, without a doubt, that she is an important talent to reckon with.

The climax of Hanna may be a foregone conclusion for many viewers, but it is also satisfying and nicely ties to the opening scenes of the movie.  The ending suggests a sequel – and perhaps a franchise – is to follow, and I want to see director Joe Wright and the screenwriters, Seth Lochhead and David Farr, continue Hanna’s story into her young adulthood and explore extreme themes of female empowerment in the spy game; for Hanna would make Jason Bourne and James Bond whimper like two little school girls.

 Trailer for Hanna

Adrien Brody, a little worse for wear, in Wrecked.

WRECKED – directed by Michael Greenspan

Rating: 3 out of 5 Chaplins

{Opens in Vancouver theatres on Friday 08 April 2011}

In Wrecked, Adrien Brody plays an anonymous man who awakes from unconsciousness to find himself trapped in a mangled car that crashed down a forest embankment.  The man is bruised, caked with dried blood, and one leg is trapped under the car dash.  He is in the passenger seat, so he knows he probably wasn’t driving the car, but that is the extent of what he can glean from his horrible situation.  The man has no idea why the car crashed, why he is in the car and, worst of all, he doesn’t know who he is.  The man’s memory and identity seems to have been completely wiped out in the wreck.  In his frantic attempt to dislodge himself, the man discovers various things that further unnerve him: a loaded gun under the driver’s seat, a dead body in the back seat, another dead body just beyond the wreck, and, when he finally extricates himself from the car, a bag stuffed with cash in the trunk.  This makes no sense to the man, and neither does the presence of a young female hiker (Caroline Dhavernas) who discovers him and proceeds to irrationally berate him as he slowly drags himself, with a broken leg, through the woods in a painful attempt to escape the forest and seek help. 

This is an intriguing set-up that leads into a compelling first half of Wrecked, eliciting a palpable sense of curiosity combined with a subtle feeling of suspense for the plight of this unfortunate man.  As he musters the will power, and whatever physical strength remains in his beat up body, the man slowly pulls himself through the forest, over the dense brush, rocks and up daunting hills, in the hopes of at least finding the road from which he plunged from in order to flag down any passing car.  Along his disorienting journey, he encounters a dog that gives him comfort, and he continually runs into that badgering woman who seems to be either a random hallucination or the manifestation of someone closely connected to his dire predicament.  Fleeting images flash in his mind that suggests he was part of something very bad, gone very wrong, that may have brought harm to the woman whose apparition haunts him.       

With very little overt action, director Michael Greenspan – working from Christopher Dodd’s minimalist, but intelligent screenplay – skilfully crafts what amounts to a silent film.  Greenspan’s masterful, unadorned use of subjective camera framing (evoking the subjective camera work of Alfred Hitchcock) and tight editing expresses the story in purely cinematic terms, firmly placing the viewer into the mind and the dilemma of the man.  Adrien Brody, one of the finest and – despite his Best Actor Oscar win for Roman Polanski’s The Pianist – arguably one of the least appreciated A-list actors working in movies today, is riveting in his role, which requires much reacting to his character’s situation.  Other than his point-of-view shots, Brody is in virtually every frame of Wrecked and his subtly nuanced performance engenders pathos, sympathy and dread as to what the viewer may discover about his past.  This is a bravura performance that is restrained and passionate at once.

The first rate cinematography by James Liston contributes to the ironic mix of claustrophobia and overwhelming sense of space, shot in a damp, unmistakable British Columbia forest. 

Wrecked is only a 91 minute movie, but by the time it reaches the end of act two, it unfortunately begins to drag as much as Brody’s character physically does so through the forest.  The filmmakers seem to have run out of ideas, and all though there are enough red herrings peppered throughout the film to keep the viewer guessing, by the time the story comes to its revelation of the man’s true identity and what actually happened to him before the accident, the payoff is dramatically disappointing.  Though there is much I admire about Wrecked, I found it to be more of a filmic exercise rather than a full-blooded movie.  It doesn’t so much crash at the end of its narrative road, but simply runs out of gas.

Trailer for Wrecked

Rutger Hauer is a vigilante vagrant in Hobo with a Shotgun

HOBO WITH A SHOTGUN – directed by Jason Eisener

Rating: 1/2 Chaplin out of 5.

{Opens in Vancouver theatres on Friday 25 March 2011}

Hobo with a Shotgun is a Canadian-made, exploitation feature film that started life as a fake movie trailer when American film director Robert Rodriguez triggered a contest for the best new grindhouse trailer when he was making his 2007 exploitation film called Grindhouse, with co-director Quentin Tarantino.  Three Nova Scotia filmmakers – Jason Eisener, Rob Cotterill and John Davies – took up the carnage-filled challenge and made, practically overnight, a trailer called Hobo with a Shotgun.  It won the contest and caught the attention of Rhombus Media, a Canadian film production company, who wanted to turn the internet sensation trailer into a full-blooded feature film.  And that is exactly what you get with the feature-length Hobo with a Shotgun; a lot of blood – full of it.  And when you’ve had your fill of blood, the filmmakers are very generous with topping you up to overflow. 

This is where I would normally encapsulate the film’s story, but there isn’t much to encapsulate as the story is in the title, Hobo with a Shotgun.  You buy your ticket and you will watch a hobo with a shotgun.  There is no way you can be disappointed for you will get exactly what is advertised on the package.  There is no story in this movie; it is a situation to hang cuts of bloody human flesh on.  Here is the sordid situation: Rutger Hauer (Blade Runner, The Hitcher) is the titular Hobo.  One morning, Hobo gets off a railway boxcar that he stowed aboard (do hobos still sneak a ride on boxcars like in the Great Depression of the 1930s, and do we still call homeless people hobos?) to find himself in a small town terrorized by gruesome acts of violence led by a crime boss named The Drake (Brian Downey) with the help of his two equally sociopathic sons (Gregory Smith and Nick Bateman).  Hobo wants to make the town a nice place, so he begins to panhandle for money in order to buy a used lawnmower and cut grass for wages, in turn, sprucing up the community (I’m not kidding!).  However, Hobo`s dreams are dashed and slashed after saving a prostitute, Abby (Molly Dunsworth), from harm and, when he goes to the police to demand they stop all the criminals, the corrupt police captain has Hobo tortured to shut him up.  But you can’t keep a good Hobo down, so he takes justice in his soiled hands by acquiring a shotgun and, with the help of Abby, attempts vigilante justice by blasting apart the bad guys.  The Drake has had enough of the bum with bullets, so he puts up a reward for Hobo’s head and the hobo hunt is on.  Thrown into this stew of bullets, blood and butchery is little bit of the Bible in the likes of Drake`s enforcers, two iron suited characters simply called Plague.  Oh, it’s a kooky little movie!

Hobo with a Shotgun wants to be an outrageously offensive black comedy of ultra-violence, inspired by director Jason Eisener’s love for the American exploitation grindhouse genre films from the 1970s and 1980s.  Hobo is outrageous.  Hobo is offensive.  Hobo is black.  Hobo is ultra-violent (it makes the original grindhouse movies it draws its inspiration from look like Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory – which is actually a far more subversive movie than Hobo).  But Hobo, as hard as it tries, ain’t no comedy.  The movie thinks it’s funny, especially when it feebly contrasts innocuous dialogue with the crazed carnage, but the script has none of the edgy snap and wit of a Tarantino movie, like Pulp Fiction (1994), or the giddy insanity of Robert Rodriguez’s Machete (2010). 

Jason Eisener’s direction is crisp, but the over-saturated and garish colours of the movie's cinematography, as appropriate in idea as that is to further heighten the already heightened comic-book violence, actually looks crappy.  Cinematographer Karim Hussain photographed Hobo with a Red Mysterium digital camera, not with a motion picture film camera, and the digital photography was further pushed to extreme stylization in the digital colour correction phase of post-production, making the movie look like it was shot on videotape (all of the brightest practical light sources in any given scene - such as a table lamp in a dark room, for example - are severely blown out).  It seems the filmmakers were trying to give Hobo the super saturated look of classic Technicolor, but this old and beautiful colour process had a far greater dynamic range of detail and richness than the ugly digital appearance of Hobo’s cinematography, which looks like puked-up Fruit Loops. 

Rutger Hauer, who was so memorable as the icy and dangerous, immortality seeking replicant Roy Batty in Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982), evokes Clint Eastwood’s The Man With No Name character (in the case of the Hobo, he’s The Bum With No Name), but Hauer’s performance is not magnetically mysterious or coolly dangerous, it is just sadly atrocious.  Hauer’s manner of speech also suggests Eastwood’s quiet and astringent vocal delivery, but it sounds off – the cadences in his voice are bizarre and sound out of tune.  Brian Downey as the evil Drake is the opposite of Hauer’s Hobo; all foaming at the mouth, gnashing teeth and wild histrionics played at a fever pitch level.  It’s amusing at first, but gets wearisome after 15 minutes.  The rest of the actors are effectively hammy, appropriate for this type of genre movie.

The star of the Hobo with a Shot Gun is the psychotronic violence, which is amped up to 11.  If you enjoy decapitations (with a bikini-clad woman gyrating in a geyser of blood shooting from the neck of one poor sap who had his head yanked off), eviscerations, mutilations and a plethora of other gruesome-ations in your movies, then Hobo should delight you and your fellow hardcore gorehounds.  For me, Hobo went from mediocre tongue-in-blown-out-cheek humour to just plain heinously sick and stupid in a scene where one of Drake’s sons torches a school bus full of innocent children, and when a cowering homeless woman who is cradling her frightened baby are incinerated with a Molotov cocktail while trapped in a garbage bin.  When despicable and gratuitous violence is perpetrated on children in a movie for supposedly "wacky" entertainment, my high threshold for being offended is emphatically crossed.  In this regard, the filmmakers should be ashamed of themselves.   

With that said, and all things being relative, Hobo with a Shotgun may be the finest  grimy gore-porn ever produced north of the 49th parallel with the help of Telefilm Canada financing and Nova Scotia tax credits.  Splatter film fans will go nuts over the nastiness.  For everyone else - you have been warned. 

Trailer for Hobo with a Shotgun (Warning: graphic violence)

FORBIDDEN PLANET (1956) - directed by Fred M. Wilcox

The 1950s saw a proliferation of science-fiction movies rife with Cold War concerns, such as the fear of communist infiltration and the threat of nuclear annihilation, all in the guise of radioactive monster mutations and the invasion of outer space aliens (due to several alleged flying saucer sightings during this time period). A few of the iconic sci-fi movies that entertained and frightened audiences in the Truman/Eisenhower era include: The Thing From Another World, The Day the Earth Stood Still, This Island Earth, Them!, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, War of the Worlds, and The Incredible Shrinking Man—movies about the effects of atomic technology gone berserk, or space aliens taking over our planet, sometimes even abducting Earthlings for the proverbial posterior probe. Arguably, the most imaginative of the ’50s sci-fi flicks—and the most influential on future filmmakers of the fantastic—was the entertaining and intelligent MGM epic, Forbidden Planet (1956). Unlike its contemporary sci-fi counterparts, this Cold War classic was not completely driven by the socio-political dynamics of its day but was actually loosely based on Shakespeare’s The Tempest.

In the 23rd century, Commander Adams (Leslie Nielsen) and the crew of the United Planets Cruiser C-57D are on a mission to the planet Altair IV, to learn the fate of a lost expedition sent there from Earth twenty years earlier.

Upon landing on Altair IV, Commander Adams discovers that the lone survivor of the original expedition, the brilliant Dr. Edward Morbius (Walter Pidgeon), is alive and well, living with his daughter Altaira (Anne Francis, who is hotter than the surface of Mars wearing galactic micro-mini dresses that  Lt. Uhura of the U.S.S. Enterprise would kill for) and their high-tech handyman, Robby the Robot. Morbius insists he will not leave Altair IV because he is staying to study the awesome Krell labs, the perfectly intact and fully operational remains of a long-dead civilization that was technologically thousands of light years ahead of humans. Morbius warns Adams that he and his crew are at risk for their lives due to an invisible monster that killed off the original explorers, yet mysteriously left him and his daughter alone. Eventually this "Id" monster—which only manifests itself when Morbius’s work is threatened and his daughter’s sexual awakening to    Commander Adams is realized—presents itself in all its horror, threatening the lives of Adams and his crew, but only ever seen as a fragmented outline illuminated by laser fire.  This memorable creature was powerfully animated by Joshua Meador of the Walt Disney special effects department on loan to MGM.  On a less visceral level than the "Id" monster, but truly more spectacular in scope, is the sequence where Morbius takes Commander Adams on a tour of the ancient, yet mind-boggling sophisticated Krell labs, the source of an incomprehensible power, which extends for miles deep into the planet.  These astonishing images were produced by seamlessly combining live-action film with beautifully detailed matte paintings epically framed in the wide-screen CinemaScope format.  Forbidden Planet will lose most of its visual power by viewing it on a small TV screen.

Trailer for Forbidden Planet

If you live in the Greater Vancouver area, you can rent the DVD of FORBIDDEN PLANET from the greatest video store in Canada, Videomatica - located at 1855 West 4th Avenue (phone: 604-734- 0411) in fabulous Kitsilano.  Website: www.videomatica.ca