The film is now considered to be one of the best films of 1951 and one of the great science fiction films of the 1950s. It garnered an 87% "Fresh" rating at the film review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes from 38 reviews, with the consensus that the film "is better than most flying saucer movies, thanks to well-drawn characters and concise, tense plotting". In 2001, the United States Library of Congress deemed the film "culturally significant" and selected it for preservation in the National Film Registry. Additionally, "Time" magazine named "The Thing from Another World" "the greatest 1950s sci-fi movie".