The Invisible Boy (1957) – Review

The dream of most actors is that after their big break they will have a long career that would allow them to explore a variety of interesting roles, whether that be in film or television, but one does not expect such an outcome from what was basically a prop from a motion picture. In 1956 the world was introduced to Robbie the Robot in the science fiction classic Forbidden Planet, a menial labourer created to help out Walter Pidgeon and Anne Francis, but due to Robbie stealing pretty much every scene this “movie prop” became a star in his own right. Robbie the Robot went on to appear in such television shows as The Thin Man, Columbo, The Addams Family and Lost in Space but his first foray after Forbidden Planet was the MGM feature film The Invisible Boy.

As was the case with 1954’s Tobor the Great, this little science fiction focuses on the premise of “A boy and his robot friend” but in the case of The Invisible Boy this relationship is more central to the plot and we get a more developed relationship between the boy and the robot, though this film takes it into a much darker place. The basic plot of this film could best be described as “A scientist allows a Skynet level computer to brainwash his son” in what must be one of the worst cases of parental neglect in cinema history. The genesis of The Invisible Boy is rather interesting as it simply stemmed from the fact that Robby the Robot was a very expensive prop and the studio wanted to get their money’s worth by having him appear in a sequel, unfortunately, a sequel to Forbidden Planet never got off the ground so MGM decided to go with a simpler approach, and by that I mean a film targeted for younger viewers.

The age-old tale of a boy and his robot.

The movie opens with the introduction of professor of mathematics Dr. Tom Merrinoe (Philip Abbott), who is the main programmer at the Stoneman Institute of Mathematics, which is conveniently located next to his own home, but more importantly, we also meet this film’s villain an evil supercomputer that is equal parts Brainiac from the Superman comics and the world-destroying Skynet from the Terminator movies. We learn that the military will soon be launching a weapons system into space and they want this wunderkind of a computer to go over the calculations just to be safe side, hoping to get it in orbit before the Commies find out about it, which eventually leads to the supercomputer’s own plans for world domination.

Hal 9000 has nothing on this computer.

Of course, this movie isn’t only about evil computers and the arms race between America and the Soviet Union as this film is basically a “kid’s fantasy” and thus much of the screen time will be filled with the shenanigans of Merrinoe’s ten-year-old soon Timmie (Richard Eyer) who, much to the consternation of his father is not living up to his potential.  Timmie never combs his hair and slurps his soup during dinner, basically, the kid is a great disappointment and Merrinoe is not afraid to make this fact known to his son – Father of the Year this guy is not – and when his kid’s failure to understand math problems or offer a proper chess match he turns to this multi-million dollar supercomputer for help. Who needs good parenting when you can abuse government property? Unfortunately, the computer does more than just improve the kid’s mental aptitude as it basically hypnotizes Timmie into being his unwitting pawn, made possible by Merrinoe leaving the kid alone with the computer, and before you know it Timmie is hustling his father at chess and getting access to a defunct highly advanced robot which he then easily assembles due to his hypnotically boosted intellect.

Note: The appearance of Robby the Robot in this film is rather bizarre as Merrinoe explains to his son that a vanished scientist had apparently developed a time machine and he had retrieved the robot from the future, a photograph on the wall depicting Robbie disembarking the C57D spacecraft landing at Chicago Spaceport is dated 2309 thus making this film an odd sequel to Forbidden Planet.

Once the robot is assembled the movie goes into full-on kiddie fantasy mode with Timmie trying to figure out what kind of mischief he can get himself into with a fully functional robot as his ally. It’s not all as he’d like because when he has Robby build him a large and powered box kite Timmie becomes rather dismayed when the robot won’t let him ride the thing, this is because Robby was programmed with safety protocol that prevents him from allowing humans to do dangerous things – we’re talking Isaac Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics – but such pesky notions of self-preservation doesn’t sit well with our Timmie so he brings Robby to his dad’s computer lab and has the supercomputer disable Robbie’s safety protocols. Smart move kid, you may have just doomed humanity to a robot apocalypse.

Note: The acrobatics the kid performs while hundreds of feet in the air clearly depicts that he has the survival instincts of a lemming, so that the mental boost he received obviously didn’t cover self-preservation.

Timmie gets bummed out when his mom rains on his parade, smashing the control panel to the kite and giving the kid a good hard spanking, but when Robby suggests that invisibility could solve all his problems the film is truly off and running and in some truly interesting directions. As this story unfolds one could make the argument that Timmie is a burgeoning sociopath as his actions once invisible are not too far off from what the mad scientist in The Invisible Man got involved in – not so much in the realm of mass murder but he does get even with a bully and tries to watch his parents make out in their bedroom – and after another much-deserved spanking Timmie decides to run away from home, but Robby comes up with a better idea “How about outer space?” For the next little while Timmie is blissfully missing and the movie shifts gears into a darker tone with the evil supercomputer demanding Merrinoe reveal to him the numerical code that will allow him to leave the building without triggering the self-destruct explosives that were built into the facility.

Science Note: The film does its best to explain how Timmie’s invisibility works, something to do with the refraction of light, but like other “invisible men movies” it doesn’t explain away the fact that without light reflecting within the eye you would be blind.

It’s really quite shocking how immense the tonal shift the movie takes in this second act, what with the supercomputer demanding the code or it will have Timmie tortured to death, stating “You have 58 hours. If at that end of that time you have failed to supply the required information the boy will be destroyed, as slowly as possible.” Damn, that is cold.  Are we sure this is a kid’s movie? As this is a super-smart evil computer it doesn’t simply rely on Merrinoe caving in to his demands as it also uses hypnosis and electronic implants to control other humans – this is achieved by Robby kidnapping people and performing brain surgery – but despite threats to his offspring Merrinoe continues to work against the computer and its mind-controlled minions. This leads to some fun stuff, like Robby the Robot fighting his way through the military might of the U.S. Army to gain access to the rocket ship that was intended to launch the weapon system into orbit, but they are all shocked to find out that the robot is impervious to bazookas and flamethrowers.

“I am monitored to chew bubble gum and kick ass and I’m all out of bubble gum.”

With a completely oblivious Timmie, who Robbie at some point had smuggled the clueless kid aboard the rocket, the computer makes one last-ditch effort to convince Merrinoe to hand over the code, “You are of course aware that the robot is a skilled anatomist familiar with every fibre of the human nervous system and capable of inflicting pain for days, if necessary, without bestowing death.” Once again, damn, that is some pretty harsh stuff for what is supposedly a kid’s movie, but Merrinoe is made of sterner stuff and even when the computer states that “The robot is monitored to drop 150 strontium bombs in a single circuit of the planet” he still refuses back down. I was actually quite impressed at this point with Merrinoe, sure he is a complete failure as a parent but he fully understands that if the computer is allowed to become an orbiting menace then mankind would be pretty much fucked. Lucky for Timmie, when the computer orders Robby to proceed with the torture, starting with the kid’s eyes, the robot is able to fight off its altered programming long enough for Timmie to switch on Robby’s original safety protocols.

Couldn’t he have tortured him just for a little bit?

Stray Observations:

• The dad is rather blasé about his ten-year-old son being able to assemble a robot that dozens of other scientists had failed to get working.
• Timmie’s mom gets upset when she bumps into Robby while vacuuming and for some reason she assumes he is a door-to-salesman. This begs the question “Are all adults in this world monumentally obtuse?”
• When the supercomputer alters Robby’s programing, basically removing Isaac Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics, it also makes Robby nigh indestructible. I’m not sure what kind of programming can change the molecular stability of a matter, then again, I’m not Skynet.
• When Timmie shows up for dinner, while invisible, his father’s rather blasé reaction is to say “Stop all this nonsense and start acting sensibly” and he then tells his wife that the kid is just doing this to get attention. Is this guy an absent-minded professor or clinically insane?
• Robby the Robot is somehow able to kidnap and perform mind-controlling brain surgery without anyone seeing him lumbering about, was part of his new programming stealth ninja skills?

Now, his tackling the armed forces, that I totally buy.

To say that The Invisible Boy is an odd duck of a film would be a vast understatement as not only do you have some of the worst parenting imaginable on display, even if we let slide his willingness to let his child die for the sake of the human race, one doesn’t expect such things as brainwashing, surgical implants and torture to appear in a film that is intrinsically a kid’s movie, but when the film focuses on the actual science fiction aspects of the film, the parts that don’t involve the annoying kid, we get some really chilling moments. I especially loved the computer’s last-ditch effort to keep from being dismantled, via Merrinoe and an axe, with the computer mesmerizing both father and son and stating “I will lead you out to the planets. I will show you the furthest reaches of the galaxy. I will show you the stars. If only you will serve and obey me” but even that awesome sales pitch doesn’t work so it changes tactics a bit “I will seek out organic life wherever it may exist down to even the littlest virus which in time might evolve mentality. So at last, all the universe will be cleansed. All will be sterile. All will be myself.” It should be noted that even though this villain sounds a lot like Superman’s computer nemesis Brainiac this movie came out a year before that character’s first appearance in Action Comics. MGM’s The Invisible Boy may be goofy as hell but when it comes to evil computers bent on humanity’s downfall this is the granddaddy of them all and its influence on the genre is probably greater than you think.

Sadly, the movie ends with Robby intervening in Timmie’s much-deserved spanking.

If we ignore the idiotic antics of Timmie and his criminally negligent parents and focus on the aspects of the film that surround the sentient computer, one that is hellbent on wiping out humanity, there is much to appreciate here, unfortunately, as good as those moments are it is hard to look past the annoying “boy genius and his robot pal” aspect because as cool as Robby the Robot is, and he is one of the coolest robots ever created, every moment they were on screen together I wanted Robby to vaporize the little shit. That all said, if you have I high tolerance for annoying kids and a great love for movies about evil computers then The Invisible Boy is well worth checking.