I’m a sucker for a dinosaur movie, but much like the light-footed T-Rex in The End of Oak Street, this one crept up on me.
The marketing for this one has been fairly low key. Little fanfare. A trailer that intrigued but didn’t give too much away. A late summer release date, just out of the way of the big boys but close enough to be taken semi-seriously.
Dinosaurs in suburbia. Shit, that’s all you had to say.
This less-is-more approach gave me Cloverfield vibes, which is no great surprise seeing as The End of Oak Street is the latest offering from J.J Abrams’ infamous mystery box.
J.J. Abrams produces The End of Oak Street. David Robert Mitchell (It Follows) takes on the writing and directing duties, but it’s still got J.J’s diet Spielberg fingerprints all over it.
The End of Magic
The End of Oak Street is set in 1982 and strives to recreate that Amblin feel. Superman duvet covers. Pop culture posters on every wall. Boys riding around the neighbourhood on their bikes, spying on the new girl and being pursued by bullies.
There’s only one thing missing – the magic. I did consider whether it was me who has lost his magic, but I don’t think that’s the case.
Stranger Things leaned into this kind of nostalgia to much better effect and made me feel like a kid again. The End of Oak Street is a xerox. Not a bad xerox, but a copy nonetheless.
The movie’s main mistake is not making the boy, Brian, the main character. Brian’s parents, Greg and Denise, played by Ewan McGregor and Anne Hathaway, take centre stage. What should be a fun romp with kids in peril gets bogged down with a ‘marriage on the rocks’ subplot.
Denise is awful. She spends her nights in the basement writing a ‘fictional’ book about a woman who wants to leave her family. Greg is more likeable. He tries his best to hold everyone together, but Denise criticises him for being too optimistic about their situation.
What’s he supposed to do? Tell them they’re all going to die?
Brian’s sister, Audrey, is instantly forgettable. Brian is a giant pussy, but that’s understandable. Make the movie about him and you could give him a character arc.
The End of Community Spirit
The plot is simple: an American neighbourhood gets transported through a wormhole to a time when dinosaurs ruled the earth. Don’t ask questions! We need to get these dinosaurs to suburbia somehow. Maybe someone had to push a button every 108 minutes and forgot.
Even though the whole neighbourhood has moved, the scope of The End of Oak Street is quite narrow. Outside of the Platt family, the place feels empty. We get a few moments where we see anonymous extras being eaten, but for a movie that opens with a barbecue for the whole street, there isn’t much community spirit when the shit hits the fan.
The opening sequence had a perfect opportunity to introduce a wider cast that we can see in peril later. Maybe they could band together to battle the dinosaur threat.
But Tremors this is not. The few characters that are introduced return later in a perfunctory way. It’s not terrible, but they could have squeezed so much more juice from it.
Unlike the people, the dinosaurs are everywhere, with a wide variety of species featured. Any dinosaur design will inevitably draw comparisons to Jurassic Park/Jurassic World, but these look sufficiently different and are well animated.
You could say that these are modern dinosaurs, and you know what that means. No, not blue hair and nose rings. They have feathers. And fur.
The End of the Review
The Platt family hide in their house, squabble, and only venture outside when the kids start making stupid decisions. At one point Audrey sits in the car at night with the headlights on, blasting Steve Winwood’s Valerie.
I know what you’re thinking – a dinosaur will hear and attack her. But nothing comes of it!
In another scene, the basement is completely flooded. Surely this will signal the arrival of some aquatic based dinosaurs and result in a Crawl-like cat-and-mouse chase. Er…no. They just close the door.
There’s more juice! Squeeze!
Brian then leaves the house to look for his dog, Starbuck (he has a Battlestar Galactica poster on the wall). This triggers the rest of the movie, as first his sister and then his parents go looking for him.
This is where the movie works best. The dinosaur action is mostly exciting, with a few ‘holy shit’ moments more than offsetting the occasional ‘get the fuck out of here’ moment. Minor spoiler alert: Ewan McGregor knocks out a T-Rex with a sledgehammer. But what follows makes up for it. Mostly.
Thematically, there’s isn’t much going on with The End of Oak Street, other than a weak ‘family’ theme. Dinosaurs in suburbia ought to be a metaphor for something, like communism, or door-to-door salesmen, but they’re not. They’re just dinosaurs in suburbia. And that’s just fine, I suppose. But it could have been more.
That said, The End of Oak Street is an original property that delivers some thrills within its lean 99-minute runtime. The Back to the Future ending is batshit insane and I can’t work out if I love it or hate it. Just don’t think too hard about the moral implications.
