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
Alien (film) an alien that looked "real"." A "couple of years" later he began work on a similar story that would focus more on horror. "I knew I wanted to do a scary movie on a spaceship with a small number of astronauts", he later recalled, ""Dark Star" as a horror movie instead of a comedy." Ronald Shusett, meanwhile, was working on an early version of what would eventually become "Total Recall". Impressed by "Dark Star", he contacted O'Bannon and the two agreed to collaborate on their projects, choosing to work on O'Bannon's film first as they believed it would be less