In a Tempest-derived plot, the blissfully Oedipal existence of a father (Walter Pidgeon) and daughter (Anne Francis), living in isolation on the planet Altair 4 in the twenty-first century, is interrupted by the arrival of a search party. The presence of these male earthlings unleashes the subconscious wrath of the father, whose Caliban-like “id-beast” threatens to destroy the lot of them, just as Altair 4's indigenous inhabitants, the Krell, were destroyed by their own subconscious rage “after millions of years of shining sanity.” This futuristic Freudian fable deftly links the Oedipal complex with the A-bomb; the forbidden planet is the uncharted territory of the human subconscious. Of course that's a tall order for a sci-fi script, and one of the perverse pleasures of Forbidden Planet lies in watching actors like the ligneous Leslie Nielson wallow helplessly in such lines as “We're all part monsters in our subconscious, so we have laws and religion.” But when words and actors fail the film, its colors (a soft world of aquas and peach), special effects (the invisible id-beast made visible), music (the eerie “tonalities” of the Krell), and set design (angular doorways leading to other doorways like a cavernous mindscape) are a match for its lofty intent.