Avatar is out on DVD and still we don't know what director James Cameron plans to do next. Cameron remains indecisive, though he has a laundry list of movie projects he's considering being involved in. Among them Avatar 2, Battle Angel Alita, another underwater movie no one wants to see called The Dive, and Forbidden Planet. As recently as a couple of months ago Cameron confirmed that he was actively involved in developing Forbidden Planet but hadn't “made any decisions about it yet.” We're still waiting for him to make one.

While we wait, let's take a closer look at what he's considering. As the name suggests, Forbidden Planet is based on the classic 1956 science fiction movie of the same name. Till now most have assumed this would be a remake, but since I have the J. Michael Straczynski written script Cameron's planning to use sitting in front of me on my desk, I can tell you that it is absolutely not. Instead what JMS has done is craft a well-thought out, straight-up prequel. More than that, he's laid the groundwork for a whole franchise of Forbidden Planet movies which could eventually lead to a remake of the 1956 film down the road, but not until they've told at least two completely new stories on screen.

There are similarities here between what Cameron's already done on Avatar and what he could do with Forbidden Planet. Both movies center on exploring one complex, fully realized world and both movies begin with a group of humans landing on an alien planet to uncover the mysteries of its environment. In Avatar it's a world covered in and controlled by sentient biology, in Forbidden Planet it's a world covered in and controlled sentient technology. Replace the lush jungles of Pandora with an unbelievably massive, globe-spanning, alien city and you'll get what I'm hinting at here. From there the stories diverge drastically but if Cameron wanted to make his next step a movie with a similar theme but not so similar that it's basically an Avatar do-over (or for that matter an actual Avatar sequel) then Forbidden Planet is the perfect project.

At this point fans of the original movie are probably freaking out. In the first Forbidden Planet the planet in question, Altair, is a barren wasteland. Don't worry, JMS knows what he's doing. As he says in the script “I'm going somewhere with this” and by the time the script is finished he does a pretty great job of fitting these seeming contradictions together with the original film while setting up other unrelated sequels.

The 1956 Forbidden Planet told the story of an Earth vessel sent to an alien planet called Altair, where twenty years earlier another human crewed vessel called the “Bellerophon” vanished. This Forbidden Planet tells the story of the Bellerophon, and even if you've seen the original movie which discusses that ship's fate intimately, it's nothing at all like you'd expect while at the same time remaining faithful to the subsequent story already told in the first movie full of clever nods to its cinematic predecessor. In fact Straczynski's take hints at things going on behind the scenes of the original movie, and if it's made it'll change the tone of that film the next time you watch it, while at the same time sticking with established facts.

Like those classic science fiction serials of which the 1956 movie was a part, JMS's script seems less concerned with explaining how and why this story happens and more concerned with just getting down to the business of spaceships, strange worlds, and hard science fiction. In doing so it changes some of the minor nuances of the original movie. Instead of being set in a far off future, the prequel's actually set in a near future. The technology used to send the Bellerophon to Altair is pretty new, and the way in which mankind gets the knowledge needed to do it is a critical component to the plot.

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Almost the entire movie is spent on Altair, with the crew wandering around trying to uncover the secrets of an absent alien race. Only two characters from the 1956 film make it into the prequel: Dr. Edward Morbius and Robby the Robot. Morbius is a linguist aboard the Bellerophon. Robby on the other hand, is not exactly the same robot seen in the original film, think of him more as that robot's template. Except of course, he's been drastically redesigned.

Robby is there on the planet when the crew arrives and he's described in the script as twelve feet tall and angular, though vaguely humanoid. This Robby, actually named RBI, is sleek and menacing in appearance, his limbs connected to his torso by energy more than metal. By contrast the 1956 Robby was seven feet high and looked kind of like what would happen if you stuck and egg-shaped fishbowl on the Michelin Man's head. It's an improvement. It also allows him to be an active participant instead of wandering around ineffectually and s

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