Heads Up: Forbidden Planet

Hoorah!  Another heads up.  It would have been nice to get a few suggestions to you for the holidays, but I was back home, and the internet isn't provided in Fangorn forest where my parents live.  I hope you all watched the Star Wars Holiday Special for Christmas, or for Life Day, if you don't like to shave.

Anyway.  Today I wanted to give you a heads up about the 1956 science fiction film "Forbidden Planet."  This film is based on Shakespeare's "The Tempest," kind of, and tells the story of a crew sent on a mission to a far away planet to investigate the disappearance of the last ship that went there.  The story is really quite interesting and builds to a thrilling conclusion.
Enough with the pleasantries, though.  This movie is great because of how it looks.  It came out in 1956, and I haven't come across a better looking sci-fi that came out until Star Wars, two decades later.  This movie looks incredible.  I really like the style of 50's and 60's sci-fi effects, so it only takes a good space ship model or matte painting of an alien planet to get me giddy anyway, but this movie presents so many more cool images in ways that are still completely riveting.  This movie broke ground in ideas for animation, music and included the first substantial robot since Metropolis.  It deserves mentioning that the robot's name was "Robbie the Robot," and his career really tanked after this movie; appearing in some really low quality b films.  Back to point: this movie simply looks incredible.  Even now in 2012, which as far as we know might be the last year films are ever made by mankind if the Mayans and Roland Emmerich are right, this film has incredible visuals.  From start to finish the special effects are creative and varied and brilliantly implemented to create a wonderfully engaging sci-fi world including ancient ruins of an advanced civilization, ray guns vaporizing tigers, and giant invisible monsters.  It's great stuff.
The music is also really noteworthy.  composed by Louis and Bebe Barron, it is the first all electronic score, and predates the invention of the MOOG synthesizer by almost a decade.  They essentially invented synthesizers for this movie, because nothing like that existed yet.  The score creates a nervous, foreign and completely alien atmosphere, and I love it.
Oh yeah, and the movie stars Leslie Nielsen, before he started doing comedy.  That's interesting.
So, in the end, you should watch this movie, probably.  It is a super cool science fiction story wrapped up in an incredible science fiction film.  Still, all these decades later, completely mind blowing, so much so that Robbie just can't help but give himself an oil-job when he thinks about it.