dreadfully limited. The dialogue—especially in the faked-up romance between Doctors Meacham and Adams—remains resolutely earth-bound, while the ending is simply a spacial variation on the conventional curtain. Joseph Newman has done his best to make his characters as intriguing as his special effects, but they have neither the stature nor the expression." Since its original release, the critical response to the film has continued to be mostly positive. Bill Warren has written that the film was "the best and most significant science fiction movie of 1955 … [it] remains a decent, competent example of any era's science fiction output". In Phil Hardy's The Aurum Film Encyclopedia: Science Fiction, the film was described as "a full-blooded space opera complete with interplanetary warfare and bug-eyed monsters ... the film's space operatics are given a dreamlike quality and a moral dimension that makes the dramatic situation far more interesting". Danny Peary felt that the film was "colorful, imaginative, gadget-laden sci-fi". At the film review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds a score of 71%, based upon 14 reviews. Greater Milwaukee Today described it as "an appalling film". In popular culture The design for the Metaluna Monitor has proved itself to be an iconic look for an alien. Influencing even H.R. Giger's design for the Xenomorphs in the Alien franchise. This has led to the design being used in several homages, as well as the Metaluna Monitor himself making appearances in various pieces of film, television, games, and other forms of pop-culture. Castle Films released a 9 to 12-minute (depending on projector speed) 8 mm cutting from the film (and retitled it War of the Planets) for the home movie audience, beginning in 1961. In Explorers (1985), one of the films that Ben (played by Ethan Hawke) watches is This Island Earth. In that film and this one, the character builds a device with help from an alien so that they may meet. A brief homage to This Island Earth is seen in E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982). E.T. turns the television on during a showing of the film, at the scene when Cal and Ruth are being abducted by the aliens, and Cal says "They're pulling us up!" A segment of the television series Wonder Woman (season 2, episode 10, 1977) uses space battle footage from the film, and the alien planet shown is also recycled This Island Earth footage. The album Happy