An entire suburban neighborhood is transported to the Cretaceous period, and a fractured family fights for survival, in The End of Oak Street, opening in Prague and cinemas worldwide this weekend. But this irresistible premise goes nowhere frighteningly quickly, and despite some diverting filmmaking flourishes from director David Robert Mitchell and excellent 1982 period detail, an underwritten script and a finale that raises more questions than it answers leave us wanting.
The End of Oak Street stars Ewan McGregor and Anne Hathaway as Greg and Denise Platt, a suburban couple whose marriage is already on the rocks when their entire neighborhood is suddenly ripped from 1982 and deposited in a prehistoric wilderness. Their children, Audrey (Maisy Stella) and Brian (Christian Convery), are caught between their parents as the family attempts to reunite and survive a neighborhood suddenly populated by dinosaurs.
There are some nice things going on before the dinosaurs arrive. Greg has been struggling to make ends meet, taking pizza-delivery jobs after losing his regular employment, while Denise works on novels in the basement that increasingly seem to reflect her dissatisfaction with her marriage and family life. Audrey and Brian can sense the tension between them. Their dog Starbuck causes problems with neighbor Mel Jacobs (P.J. Byrne), while an elderly neighbor’s strange new flower and mysterious flashes of light hint that something is very wrong.
The film gets through this setup quickly and efficiently, and then Mitchell delivers one of the film’s best images: a huge circular section of the suburban neighborhood has been transported wholesale millions of years into the past, with some houses literally sliced in half at the edge of the displacement. The family attempts to drive away, only to discover that every road leads into prehistoric wilderness. Then the dinosaurs start appearing on the streets. It’s a terrific premise, but the movie doesn’t really know what to do with it.
The End of Oak Street feels like it could develop in any number of fascinating directions. What would happen if an entire modern neighborhood were suddenly isolated in the prehistoric past? How would its residents organize? What would happen when food, electricity and other resources run out? How would they defend themselves? How would the neighborhood’s social dynamics change when the laws of civilization are suddenly replaced by the laws of the jungle? But Mitchell’s script mostly asks the Platts to wander around the neighborhood and avoid dinosaurs.
There are almost no featured characters outside the family, apart from Jeanette (Jordan Alexa Davis), a new girl in town whom the children encounter during the crisis. The family drama doesn’t provide enough material to sustain the movie on its own, either. Denise’s dissatisfaction with her marriage is almost entirely contained within her character, and her relationship with Greg is resolved with almost shocking ease given how much emphasis the film places on their impending divorce.
At least it delivers on the dinosaur premise. After years of the Jurassic Park and Jurassic World movies threatening to unleash dinosaurs into populated areas, only to repeatedly retreat to familiar park-and-jungle settings, there’s something genuinely satisfying about watching a T. rex stalk through suburban streets. Netflix’s similarly-themed and largely unsatisfying The Last House, released just last weekend, holds its creatures back until the very end, but The End of Oak Street understands that the fun is in seeing prehistoric predators invade places where they absolutely don’t belong.
The dinosaurs themselves are also well conceived. Mitchell favors more scientifically plausible creatures over the scaly reptiles traditionally seen in Hollywood dinosaur movies: the T-Rex has feathers, while the raptors are distinctly avian, almost emu-like. Unfortunately, the visual effects don’t quite match the ambition. The creatures are entirely computer-generated, with very little in the way of practical effects, and the animation frequently looks more cartoonish than convincing. The Jurassic films remain the benchmark for this kind of spectacle.
Mitchell is a filmmaker whose previous work suggests considerably more ambition than this material ultimately allows. His 2014 It Follows remains one of the strongest horror films of the past decade, while 2018’s Under the Silver Lake is a wonderfully strange contemporary noir and one of the most under-appreciated films of the decade. There’s a stronger hand behind the camera than in the usual Hollywood blockbuster in The End of Oak Street, but little sense of the storyteller who made those movies.
Mitchell does, however, give the movie a striking visual identity. Cinematographer Michael Gioulakis shoots the suburban 1982 setting in faded, nostalgic widescreen images with a tangible film-grain texture. The frequent split-diopter compositions, keeping characters in both the foreground and background sharply in focus, aren’t always subtle, but they do reinforce the movie’s central theme of a family that has become emotionally fractured even before the world around them literally breaks apart.
The period detail is excellent throughout, capturing a version of 1982 suburbia that feels lived-in rather than artificially retro. And Michael Giacchino’s flavorful, uplifting sounds like it was beamed in from a different era of Hollywood adventure filmmaking, giving the movie a warmth and momentum that the screenplay sometimes struggles to generate. It’s almost enough to convince you that you’ve seen a better film than you actually have.
Then comes the ending, which attempts to pull everything together with a Back to the Future-style time-travel conceit. It’s the kind of twist that might work if the film had spent more time establishing the rules of its world, but here it arrives out of nowhere and raises more questions than it answers. The tidy bow the screenplay tries to place around its increasingly complicated mythology doesn’t make the premise clearer; it only makes the whole thing feel more arbitrary.
That’s the frustrating thing about The End of Oak Street: there are plenty of individual elements to enjoy, and the film is compulsively watchable even when very little is happening. But the further it goes, the more you begin thinking about all the movies it could have been instead of the one you’re actually watching.
Many critics will likely dismiss it outright, and it’s easy to understand why. But there’s still something refreshing about a mostly original studio movie arriving at the multiplex amid a summer dominated by sequels, remakes and franchise extensions. The End of Oak Street has an irresistible hook, some excellent period filmmaking, a handful of memorable dinosaur sequences and a genuine affection for the adventure movies of another era. It just never figures out how to turn that hook into a satisfying story.
One Response
Those are actually Coelophysis, not any variety of raptor, and an allosaurus not a tyrannosaur. Accurate design of the dinosaurs was indeed better than Jurassic World films