2026 | rated PG-13 | starring Anne Hathaway, Ewan McGregor, PJ Byrne | written & directed by David Robert Mitchell | 1 hr 39 mins | 3 1/2 out of 5 |
The Platt family, father Greg (Ewan McGrregor), mother Denise (Anne Hathaway), daughter Audrey (Maisy Stella) and son Brian (Christian Convery, Sweet Tooth) live in a quiet suburban street in the 1980s, when one day their entire neighborhood is mysteriously teleported back to prehistoric times where they are immediately besieged by dinosaurs.
Like last year’s Primitive War, David Robert Mitchell’s The End of Oak Street is an original story that attempts to break dinosaurs as a villain out of the monopoly that Jurassic World has had on them for the past decade. As I lamented in my review of Jurassic World: Rebirth, the dinosaurs in those franchises are treated with kid gloves as endangered species, miracles of nature and out of time. By flipping that dynamic and moving its human characters back into the prehistoric past, it allows dinosaurs to rise back to the top of the food chain and, for the necessary purpose of our story, be vicious monsters again. That’s the immediate appeal of Oak Street. The dinosaurs in this movie are monsters again. The humans are out-of-time playthings for these beasts and watching them sneak around a modern suburban setting where at any moment they can come out from behind a house, a fence or an above-ground pool is somewhat unnerving.
The film’s pace and immediacy are its greatest assets. It delivers a high-concept idea and then runs with it, efficiently dropping just enough character bits along the way to keep its lead quartet interesting. Our family doesn’t have much time to get their bearings or come up with a plan before their house turns into Jumanji and they spend the rest of the time simply trying to survive against a regular onslaught of different dinosaur species (it’s unclear what era they are in, just “the dinosaur era”). Mitchell’s camera goes wide in every trip they make outside, surveying damage to the neighborhood as gunshots are heard in the distance, geysers burst up through the concreate, bloodstains splatter roads and roofs and other neighbors are being chased by dinosaurs in the distance. For what it is, the worldbuilding here is immersive.
Produced by J. J. Abrams’ Bad Robot, Oak Street follows Super 8 as an Abrams’ Spielberg 80’s tribute band. A PG-13 adventure, good for the whole family but that doesn’t shy away from scares. The rating on this one is kind of shocking given the amount of death and blood in it. Small children will be frightened, but also, that’s how it was in the 80s when movies weren’t so sanitized of every rough edge. Mitchell seems to be the right guy for the project, instilling a horror movie instinct into the picture that another director may have turned into more of a crowd-pleasing adventure. For example, in that movie, the young boy with the bow and arrow would have landed a perfect shot and saved the day in a key moment, in Mitchell’s movie, he’s an awkward, uncoordinated kid who misses every time.
And yet, part of me also wanted that crowd-pleasing part, well, in the sense that I wanted something more structured. This movie ultimately has a pretty loose, free-wheeling story. The side effect of the immediacy is that it feels low-calorie and superficial. For example, of all the dinosaurs in the film there is one that stands out as the greatest threat that affects the Platt family in a specific way (for reasons not revealed here). It would have been more satisfying if they ended up facing off with that dinosaur and fought back, closing the arc on that little story, instead of just running away from every encounter.
The phrase “turn your brain off” is regularly overused by critics and people on the internet. They regularly use it as a mandate, a switch you flip as you walk into the theater. That’s not really what “turn your brain off” is supposed to mean. It’s not something that you do, it’s something the movie should do to you. It’s better explained by Roger Ebert related to comedies as a movie hitting “escape velocity”. That it gets so many things right early, that it moves at such a good clip and is so entertaining that you are swept up in the action and just go with it. It’s a good sign if you think back on something later and it doesn’t make sense in retrospect than it not making sense in the moment, throwing a wrench in the plot in real time and halting your enjoyment (like me with Obsession). The End of Oak Street is very simple and straightforward, it is deliberately designed around a mystery box it doesn’t need to answer and smartly doesn’t waste precious time trying, but it has an escape velocity momentum that I was swept up in. I won’t get into the “real world invading suburbia” metaphor that most film critics will be salivating over. They’ve been rubbing their hands together fetishizing about invading and destroying suburbia for decades.
The final stretch opens up a time loop pandora’s box that Mitchell isn’t ready to reconcile here. I would actually be curious to see a sequel called The Other End of Oak Street about the other end of the time loop dealing with the consequences of this movie. That would be an innovative sequel.