Scene II

Covers the landing of C-57D on Altair IV, and the crew's first encounter with Robby the Robot.

A wide angle shot of C-57D coming in to land. This is working art, but isn’t up to par with the space shots. However C-57D has a slight wobble, which tells us that it’s a model spinning on its axis. And the combination of the music and cruiser's shadow as it comes in to land are nice counterpoints. The landscape is quintessentially 1950’s alien representation. The landscape of The Martian (in glorious Ultra HD) is all pixelated visual delight. Here it’s as if you’re in a dreamscape. The jagged rocks and dual moons harken back to what alien landscapes were supposed to look like in Flash Gordon. TV will take California, put a filter over the camera and call it ‘alien’. Even where big budgets abound, Alien: Covenant for example, production can’t be located anywhere more alien than New Zealand. It’s a catch 22; for realism you need to shoot outside, or on a soundstage. For extra-terrestrial verve it’s CGI. If you combine the two, you get Pandora's jungle from Avatar. Maybe that’s the acceptable middle ground?

The landing could have done without the ‘blue haze’ effect under the ‘less is more’ principal. I don’t think it adds anything and would've saved the ‘wow’ for later use. This is an appetizer to the main FX events and, like all starters, just makes you a bit less hungry when the main course is served. I do like the ‘foot’ of C-57D as it sets down. Once perched on its pedestal, supports come out with the mechanical whine ubiquitous with any spaceship. I swear the same effect haunts the Millennium Falcon, and the Sulaco’s drop ships. That wail as servo’s crank down; maybe it’s the same sound effect? We only see two supports. For a long time this confused me. How can two supports stop the ship tipping over? Then I realized that as Adams and his men come descent, the angle shows you that there must be three supports. This makes more sense and, I imagine, gives the crew a feeling of enormous wellbeing that C-57D won’t topple over and look incapacitated like the Martian landers in Wells’ War of the Worlds. 

A security detail of two expendables fan out holding guns with handles. Once more we harken back to the good ‘ole days when designers could go crazy designing futuristic tech. SciFi weapons of the 80's upwards are closer to modern guns.  I’m thinking about Starship Troopers (which Heinlein definitely would not have approved of) and the M41A Pulse Rifles from Aliens. The guns in Forbidden Planet look crap and, as we’ll discover, function follows form. I know the luckier marines in Aliens ended up in body bags, but at least they killed a s**t load of aliens in the process. The guns in Forbidden Planet look like something my kids would end up making out of toilet roll tubes if I had sufficient cash to bribe them to decouple from the internet and invent a plasma rifle for the 23^rd century. God help the crew (plot spoiler: s/he/they/it won’t).

The Bosun announces it’s “all clear, Sir”. As if it not being all clear, like they’d landed in a nest of the man-eating plants from The Little Shop of Horrors, would help. I mean all three staircases are down, and you sent out two guys holding golf ball retrievers to form a permitter. Math isn’t my strong point, but 2 guards divided by 3 staircases doesn't equal 1 does it? A camouflaged Predator could already be right behind the skipper ready to rip out his skull (plus bonus spinal cord) for the trophy cabinet. Time for a refresher on the security procedures SOP. 

The Doctor [Trek Alert: he’s clearly one of Adam’s counsellors, although we’re missing a Spock. Jerry doesn’t count, he’s incompetent. But two thirds of the triad are here] waxes lyrical about Altair IV’s sky and how someone might grow to love it. Here we see a juxtaposition: C-57D with the Bellerophon, and the Doctor with Morbius. Already the Doctor looks dreamy-eyed, as we imagine Morbius was on seeing Altair IV for the first time.

Cue action. The Doctor spots ‘dust’ on the horizon. What looks like Altair IV’s version of the Tasmanian Devil, turns out to be something dreamed up by Howard Stark. Enter Robby the Robot. Today, Robby looks clunky and kitsch. Modern representations of future robots focus on their humanistic qualities: Blade Runner’s Replicants, STTNG’s Data, the androids from the Alien franchise. CHAPPiE is perhaps the closest modern equivalent. Of course it’s easier (and cheaper) to employ a human and make it a robot. Star Wars did a nice job of diffusing this with R2-D2, although C-3PO cancelled that out. However many other robots in Star Wars, especially those seen with Episode IV's Jawas, are hardly human. Robby can be seen as the progenitor of androids to come. He’s (assigned male pronoun, although ‘It's’ would be more correct) got two legs, two arms, fingers, a head, a mouth and ears of sorts. He looks like a deep-sea diver of olden days, ready to sink to the ocean floor and recover untold treasures. I think for an impressionable child of the late 1950’s, Robby performs the same function as C-3PO did for me in 1977. The mechanical gait and artificial voice all spoke of man’s ability to play God, to recreate something in his own image. The problem with non-human robots is that they just don’t look human enough. Exceptions (where the audience is asked to bond with the character) would be 'Number 5' from 1986's Short Circuit or, more recently, Disney's Wall-E although as a digital character I think this is cheating since Wall-E can be manufactured to exhibit human traits.  There needs to be some familiarity, something to identify with. As with anthropomorphism, if we can view something as 'us', we can identify with it. That’s why the monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey works so well as a mysterious device, we can’t identify with it - apart from as an all-powerful, blank domino.

We also get our first gag. Adams notes the high oxygen content. Robby responds, “I rarely use it myself, Sir. It promotes rust”. This sort of atmospheric pun must’ve had nerds in the audience tittering. Jocks, present only to try and get to first base, presumably didn’t get the joke. Cooky then asks the question on every enlisted man’s mind, “is it male or female?” (translation, can I shag it?). He doesn’t get a straight ‘no’ so ambles off to think of ways to turn ‘that’s a meaningless question’ into a firm ‘yes!’. His ultimate tactic, as we shall see, is tried and tested. 

Robby offers to drive them to “The Residence”. Adams tells Chief Quinn to come if he blinks his communicator red. In what appears to be the second joke of the movie, Quinn responds with all seriousness that he’ll “bring the tractor in a hurry”. I haven’t been to the 23^rd century, but logic tells me that when you apply the label ‘tractor’ to something, you don’t associate it with the word ‘hurry’. Ploughing, yes. Lugging tons of stuff around, certainly. Hammering at breakneck speed to rescue your Captain from The Residence’, no. Perhaps this tractor is also fitted with a hyper-drive? That would work. Perhaps all tractors in the 23^rd century will have FTL capability. But when you see it later, you’ll be forgiven for wondering what Adams was thinking when he didn’t tell Quinn to stop f*****g around.

ADAMS: If it blinks red, you’re to take off ASAP and come get me. Oh, but check for excreted resin on the stairs first, ok?

QUINN: Excreted sir? Excreted from what?

ADAMS: Don’t start, Chief.

Adams, the Doctor and Jerry agree to be driven off in Robby’s car. This has all the stylistic representation that the 1950’s could throw at it. It does look a bit like an early version Star Wars landspeeder, in the same way that a car designer makes a sexy, stylized drawing to persuade the manufacturer to produce it. But what actually comes off the production line is a boring piece of crap. So, Robby’s car is the original fun design for the POS that Luke Skywalker ended up driving. The Doctor draws an unspoken short straw and has to sit in between Adams and Jerry (without the benefit of a plexiglass dome to deflect the wind). Luckily his hat, likely coupled with the prodigious amount of product applied to gents' hair in those days, looks up to the task of stopping winds in excess of tractor hyper-drive from getting his quiff out of shape. Seat belts are fastened, which I believe is a subversive message from a writer.

Off they go, a plume of dust in their wake.