Forbidden Planet (1956) film review

tl;dr I do recommend watching this movie and I have some notes and a suggestion.

First things first; I have to say I’m not an old movie or a sci-fi nut. I thought maybe it’s a good idea to give an old sci-fi movie a chance. after some web surfing and research, I decided to watch this particular movie; in part because I just loved the poster design. The art style excites my inner child.

Forbidden Planet stars a very young Leslie Nielsen in a surprisingly serious role. That was probably one of the main reasons I picked this film as my gateway to vintage sci-fi. The movie was photographed in Eastman Color which I would guess is a pretty big deal because they tell you this right at the begining. And honestly for a movie from 1956 the quality of the picture and colors is really impressive. There are a lot of special effects going on, despite serious technical limitations, they do set the atmosphere just right. In many cases I prefer these old school methods to modern CGI –Jurassic Park vs. Jurassic World anyone? Props to the FX crew.

The acting and directing are a bit over the top with a lot of dramatic and sudden changes of behavior. The whole thing looks very theatrical and dramatic; add that to the bizarre set and plot and you get a very theater-like experience.

The plot has everything you’d imagine a ’50s sci-fi would have: Spaceships with all-male military crew, huge and funky looking gears, dialogues with scientific-sounding nonsense, a humanoid robot that can barely move, stereotypical gullible and sexualized young blond girl that’s the target of an awful lot of sexist remarks and exploitation attempts, Freudian psychology, and unknown technology from lost alien races. They say it’s a modern retelling of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, but honestly I haven’t read that play so I wouldn’t know.

The part where this movie shines the brightest is the music score. It simply couldn’t get any more futuristic. What I didn’t know when I was watching the movie, is that it was the first ever completely electronic film score. I can hear the influence of Bebe and Louis Barron’s iconic new sound in many sci-fi and horror movies to this day.

All that said, I think you can enjoy watching this movie both ironically and un-ironically. My suggestion for you if you decided to watch this movie is to watch it late at night in the dark for a more immersive experience. The cinematography looks like a dream albeit cheesy so you may want to consider watching it half-sleep or under some kind of influence. The planet’s landscape is amazing.

Have fun. Bonus: Killian Eng’s Beautiful Poster For ‘Forbidden Planet’.

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A Late-night Thought

looking out the window, sodium lights on wet asphalt, an alien gold. I used to stare out at the city at night and just listen to music; giving my mind full autonomy over any kind of interpretation. I rarely watch music videos, they conflict with my inner accompanying image of the sound.

Years ago I listened to simpler music; over time they got progressively more abstract and wilder to picture. I would say Sigur Rós was the height, doesn’t get old, gives you freedom over what you get from it all the while carrying a strong, strong emotion.

What is art? How can we define it? For me, art is the medium for conveying feelings. Anything giving an emotion can be art if you feel it right. Be it even air hitting your face.

Can art be detached from the artist? There’s one specific version per observer, each with a unique personality. No one looks at the something and sees what others see. Our own past experiences, current feelings, and place are all mixed with whatever gets into our minds and form some image, that no one else can ever see.

Some work hard and try to make something best representing that. Try to remake it with every tool they know; be it setting focus point and shutter speed on a camera; or hitting the strings on a guitar. Some may build a world, word by word, on a blank paper with two holes, some may lay out detailed instructions for a computer to follow.

They may try to make you uncomfortable, deceived, immersed, or even frustrated. And you let the artist forever change you in ever smallest ways. Though we should all remember a single degree diversion over a long distance will result in a huge displacement.

For all we know the next music track you’ll listen to can be a determining factor in where you live five years from now.

How easily we let life happen to us without much thought…

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Milky Way

One third of the world’s population can’t see the milky way. There is even a generation of people whom have never seen the milky way.

In 1994, an earthquake shook Los Angeles, 4:30 AM, and caused a city-wide blackout. People anxiously came out of their homes to check out on the neighborhood but what greeted them up in the sky was so alien and strange to them that some called emergency and asked if the giant silvery cloud had anything to do with the disaster. (Light Pollution - PBS)

It shouldn’t be like this. We are becoming increasingly detached from the universe and drenched in our day to day struggles. We are losing the bigger picture.

I think we should all take some time off to gaze at the endless sky above every now and then. I’ll describe how your amazing star gazing trip goes.

First you find a place far from cities and their light pollution. Maybe use a map to find a remote place. Next, using a lunar calendar and the weather forecast of the place; you pick a date in the beginning or end of lunar cycle with clear night sky.

On the chosen day; you get into a car, solo or with one or two close friends or loved ones, and hit the roads. You Take a country lane or a dirt road and drive away from road lights; You see a nice place, you go a bit off road and stop at a nice, flat surface. You get out of the car, and place a mat on the ground. From this moment on you avoid any kind of light, like your phone’s screen or headlights on your car. You also avoid looking at the sky for now.

You lie down on the mat with your eyes closed, listening to silence; no music or talking for five minutes. You are giving your eyes time to rest and adapt to the dark. Also with minimal sensory input, your brain can rest a bit, and slowly put away all the filters it has set up throughout the day.

Now you feel you are ready. You open your eyes to the sky above and see the same magical thing your ancestors used to see. you see thousands of tiny balls of light scattered on this unbelievably vast black dome; they look so close that if you just reach out with your hand you can grab one. But of course they are light years afar. In the middle, stretched all across, is a wide stripe of silver. This stripe is made up of billions of indistinguishable stars, in our home galaxy, the milky way; each millions of times bigger than the earth.

You have seen pictures and videos of the night sky. But no device can ever replicate the majesty of this mind boggling image in front of your eyes.

All of a sudden you see a shooting star! There are one or more meteor showers going on. You have looked up tonight’s shower’s radiant points and keep an eye on those parts of the sky. You see tens of shooting stars through the night.

Your imagination runs wild. You stay up all night, wondering in amazement. You try to comprehend the vastness of our galaxy but the numbers don’t make any sense, they are just too big. Then you think about the countless other galaxies in the universe with their own hundreds of billions of stars. And let’s just put away the thought that there might be infinite number of parallel universes, that’s just too much.

With all these worlds out there, we can’t be alone; It’s probabilistically impossible. There should be entire races of people out there, looking above and think the same thoughts. People with their own planet, society, culture, history, gods, problems, struggles, feelings, and questions. Some of those may know the answers to the age-old questions of humanity. What are we? Do we matter? What is my place in the universe? Did this infinitely big universe conspired to make me just so I can ask these questions?

You think and think, but there’s only one thing for certain, this is beautiful. Just being able to observe this incredible beauty fills you with joy. You are looking at a painting with a canvas as big as the space and as old as the time itself. Your chance of even existing is close to zero. You must have been pretty important to the universe or maybe just extremely lucky. What does it matter?

You may use a pair of binoculars to take a closer look sometimes. Eventually the Morning Star comes and announces the imminent sunrise. You watch the sky as it’s getting brighter while a breeze caresses your face. Slowly but surely the tip of a white ball of flame appears in the east horizon; as it has for billions of years before us, and will continue to do so billions of years after we are long gone and forgotten.

After this experience, you will never be the same.

This post, in its entirety, came to me in a dream in form of an English podcast (I know, weird); In the morning of August 18, 2017.

• Image credit: Milky Way over Colorado - Max and Dee Bernt (CC BY)
• Sky Map - Android App
• Stellarium - Cross-platform, free and open source planetarium program
• Hubble site - Find mesmerising high-res images from deep space
• Our place in universe - Recommended Youtube playlist to watch before going on the trip
• Valtari - Sigur Rós - The music I was listening to that night
• Untitled #8 - Sigur Rós - The music I was listening to right before falling asleep
• Dreamchaser - Sarah Brightman - Beautiful album with a dreamy space-inspired theme

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On creative work

“Hard to start off, boring to continue, impossible to finish up”; ingredients for failure in any given task. Add unhealthy criticism to the mix and you’ll have how I feel about every thing I do or want to do.

Starting new things is hard. They just are. I try to fight this by tricking myself into starting something while it doesn’t seem like doing so. From there on it’s just changing what’s already started and not that intimating.

Anything big enough to matter is going to take long enough to get boring. Sometimes adding some unplanned stuff can spice things up a little bit. Other times the only way would be taking a break.

I know exactly why I can hardly finish what I started. The ol’ perfectionism is to blame here. Whatever you do must be perfect, but nothing can ever be perfect; so the sure way to avoid doing anything imperfect is not doing anything at all. What a brilliant solution!

Breaking free from perfectionism is probably the longest ongoing battle of my life. Looking back I made a lot of progress. Nowadays I worry about finishing a task more than I do about it being perfect. And I try to stop adding details that have diminishing returns. But actually doing something leads us to the next problem.

Unhealthy self-criticism is the new battle front. Now that I hesitate less when making, I make up for it when I have to share. I can’t remember the last time I actively tried to show-off or promote something I did. The rationale here is: if I promote it, everyone will see it and its flaws and they’re going to judge me, laugh at me or whatever. Better just leave it somewhere and don’t tell anyone about it.

In reality though, the truth is, no one really cares. People are too busy with their own lives to look for mistakes in your creations. And they don’t just happen to stumble upon your work that often. Any creative work without an audience becomes a tedious and demoralizing in its own way. I mean what’s the point if no one is going to see/use it anyway?

All that said, this whole post started as a recommendation to this short video that really changed my mindset and helped me a lot to open up. I re-watch it from time to time and I guess you can benefit from it too.

▶ A guide to worrying

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Memory

I’m a night owl. The silence and the darkness of the nights are the things I seek. Makes for a clearer head in my opinion.

I remember, in our late home, there was absolute silence at nights. Hardly anything noisy was going on. But the things that did occasionally make a sound, had the chance to be heard fully and with clarity. The one thing I remember from every night up, is the sound of sweeping.

Every night around 4 AM, I could hear the sound of sweeping on the street below my window. It had a calming quality to it. I would halt whatever I was doing and just listen. Sometimes I would go to the window and watch the sweeper as he worked his way down the street. This sound was my signal to call it a night and head to the bed.

You were a valued companion in my sleepless nights Mr. Sweeper. Though we never met, you’ll be remembered.

P.S. Memory by Andrew Lloyd Webber is a pleasant late night tune.

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Back to routines

For whatever reason, I stopped doing all my daily routines one by one. I had a few things I did daily and often on a specific time of the day. There are a lot to be said about good habits and routines, and how they can help you grow as a person every passing day. For example I used to do 5 minutes of some course on Memrise every night; it’s obvious that I learned something each time which is a good thing. But the reason I decided to start doing specific things at specific times each day again, is something completely unrelated to the task and more to do with the intervals themselves.

The thing I noticed in my routine-free life is that now I have no sense of time. Like rising and setting of the sun, those timely tasks gave me a sense of time passing by. Now that my days are a chaos of unscheduled activities, I can’t say with certainty when I did what; it wasn’t used to be like this. That’s reason enought for me to go back to doing routines, including these nightly freewritings.

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It's a trap

I fell in the perfectionists trap again for posting here.

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