A crew aboard an interstellar ship, led by a brave, confident captain, investigates the fate of an expedition sent to explore a new planet 20 years earlier. They encounter just two survivors: a scientist named Morbius and his young daughter Altaira. Morbius reveals that he has discovered the remnants of a vastly superior race called the Krell, who developed powerful mental abilities before disappearing some 200,000 years ago. When a strange force begins attacking the crew, the captain must discover the connection between the presence, Morbius and the Krell.
If this sounds like it could be an episode of “Star Trek,” that wouldn’t be far off the mark. “Forbidden Planet,” released in 1956, is one of the most influential sci-fi movies of all time. It introduced concepts and scenarios that found their way into not just “Trek,” but “Star Wars,” “Alien,” and countless others. According to Inverse, one could claim that every sci-fi movie released in the past six decades owes something to “Forbidden Planet.”
One of the most intelligent genre pictures of its time, it holds up surprisingly well today — even the visuals are pretty good for a 65-year-old film. The narrative (based loosely on Shakespeare’s “The Tempest”) is rich enough to provide the bones for an even more technologically impressive reboot — with a few tweaks (such as the men’s attitude toward Altaira and her own rather precocious sexual innocence). “Babylon 5” creator J. Michael Straczynski developed a remake back in 2008 for Warner Bros. Pictures, but by 2009 the project had been abandoned.