Henry Thomas will always be synonymous with Steven Spielberg's
E.T. He may have managed to find success in a host of other films, and even other genres (the most notable of which remains his work for none other than Martin Scorsese), yet the memory of pop culture often turns out to be a fickle and cruel tyrant. There used to be a saying in Hollywood that you're only as good as your next picture. However the passage of time seems to have proved that a more accurate maxim goes something like, "If you ever manage to make something great, then nothing else you do will ever matter". Spielberg is sort of lucky in that regard. The story of a lost alien child remains one of his most iconic and beloved pictures, yet it's clear he's just as well known for movies like
Jaws and the
Indiana Jones films, or his collaborations with Don Bluth, just as much as that archetypal image of a bicycle flying across the face of the moon. It could be argued that even the fact that a former critical flop like
Hook is starting to have its reputation re-evaluated in a positive way is a testament to the director's ability to not be limited just to any one singular bit of accomplishment. That's got to be a sign of the best sort of talent an artist can ask for, in the grand scheme of things. The fact remains, however, that while the filmmaker who directed him continued to flourish and thrive, Spielberg's former main child star from 1982 is still just Elliott so far as most viewers are concerned.
Hell, I wouldn't be surprised if most of us don't even recognize him from any of his adult performances. And I'm willing to be you anything that nobody recalls that he was ever in a kid's action adventure thriller involving spies. It was the very next thing he did right after that trip across the Moon. Cloak and Dagger is an interesting sort of film, in that it's one of those few times when a studio decides to update one of its old properties for whichever audience is currently packing theaters. Back in the 1980s, with Spielberg's Sci-Fi family epic causing its own little juggernaut in pop culture, it meant creating a studio system eager to capitalize on that picture's success. One of the most obvious ways to do that was to try and see if you could still bank on the star power of E.T's lead actor. This seems to have been the sole motivating factor in getting Cloak off the ground. The studios sniffed a potential goldmine waiting to be exploited for however long Spielberg's juggernaut lasted in the popular consciousness, and so they remade an old film for the specific purpose of having Thomas star in it. The final result was the film under the microscope today. And the real question is just how well it holds up under its own merits.
