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 (franchise) several ancient Earth cultures. Seeking the origins of humanity, they journey aboard the spaceship "Prometheus" and arrive on a distant world in the Zeta Reticuli system, the same region of space in which the planetoid from "Alien" is found. There they discover the remains of an advanced civilization (the same race as the dead pilot from the derelict ship in "Alien"), who were developing biological weapons which could have driven the human race extinct. Development of a fifth film in the series began in the early 2000s when both Ridley Scott and James Cameron started to develop ideas for a