Alien (film) disguise imaginative poverty". In a 1980 episode of "Sneak Previews" discussing science fiction films of the 1950s and 1970s, critics Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert were critical of "Alien". Ebert called it "basically just an intergalactic haunted house thriller set inside a spaceship" and one of several science fiction pictures that were "real disappointments" compared to "Star Wars", "Close Encounters of the Third Kind", and "", though he did compliment the early scene of the "Nostromo" crew exploring the alien planet as showing "real imagination". However, the film later made it onto Ebert's "Great Movies" list, where he gave it
Evolving the Alien approach is useful in exposing errors in conventional thinking, and is "painlessly educative" on the current state of the applicable sciences, but criticized their "naive optimism" with respect to future technological breakthroughs in human space travel. In his review for "Nature", Lawrence M. Krauss admitted to not being completely sure of the book's intended goal and audience, but noted that it may serve as a counterpoint to arguments put forth in Peter Ward and Donald Brownlee's book, "Rare Earth". Evolving the Alien Evolving the Alien: The Science of Extraterrestrial Life (published in the US, and UK second edition as What