The End of Oak Street Review - Dino-mite!

Like many dinosaur enthusiasts, I have grown weary of the Jurassic Park series. With only one great movie out of seven, and perhaps two additional watchable ones, the franchise has not only survived but thrived due to the lack of competition in cinemas. When was the last high-quality theatrical dino movie? Pixar’s underwhelming The Good Dinosaur in 2015? Peter Jackson’s King Kong in 2005 that sort of featured dinosaurs? Don Bluth’s The Land Before Time all the way back in 1988? Must I shuffle around in my bag for VelociPastor??

The truth is that since the 21st century, when audiences have come to expect higher-quality special effects for their creatures and monsters, dinosaurs have become very hard to feature on a modest budget. You can take a look at flops like the Will Ferrell remake of Land of the Lost (2009) or Disney’s Dinosaur (2000), whose CGI dinos were so poorly animated that they made me, a seven-year-old, realize for the first time that movies could actually look bad. The people hunger for prehistoric predators, nay, demand it, and Universal’s mediocre adventure films show up every time to make a billion dollars because of it. But finally, a big budget film with money for proper effects totally divorced from an existing franchise: The End of Oak Street!

This film was produced by none other than J.J. Abrams, now known best as a professional Star Wars-ruiner, who has smartly stepped back into production the last few years and out of the director’s chair. Working alongside promising young director David Robert Mitchell of It Follows fame, Bad Robot Productions has landed a wonderful film that will not get nearly the Box Office love it deserves. Warner Brothers desperately needs a hit following six straight flops in the theater this year (including Lee Cronin’s The Mummy and Supergirl), but marketing has been scarce for this big-screen dinosaur thriller. I very much hope Oak Street legs it out to some financial success.

The film follows an unhappy married couple (Anne Hathaway and Ewan McGregor) and their two children living the picket fence dream in 1982 suburban Michigan. Hathaway is a stay-at-home mom contemplating leaving her husband and children (and writing an aspirational novel about a woman brave enough to do so), while McGregor has recently lost his job and is secretly working pizza delivery to make ends meet. Their children, 17-year-old Audrey (Maisy Stella) and 13-year-old Brian (Christian Convery), are beginning to catch wind of the fact that their parents’ marriage is crumbling. The young actors do just fine, but McGregor and especially Hathaway shine in this movie – alongside The Devil Wears Prada 2, The Odyssey, and Verity, Hathaway is on track for a career-best year.

McGregor and Hathaway play the classic 80’s couple we have seen many times, yet never gets old because it represents how most married couples were in those days (and frankly, a lot of them now, too). Hathaway is put-upon, responsible for most things involving actually raising the children, and depressed at how her life has turned out. McGregor is sort of absent from his kids, believing his only duty as a man is to put food on the table for his family, and frustrated that the American Dream is not what he was promised. It’s a really, really old trope in cinema, but it’s one I think feels right at home in such an outward homage to Spielberg’s early films. Broken marriages as far as the eye can see!

Strange things begin happening at night, where the family sees bright flashes of light. The first day, a prehistoric plant is found in a neighbor’s backyard. The second night, a heap of dung big enough to be from eight cows appears in another neighbor’s yard. The third night, the big switch happens! Prefaced by the astronomer-in-training Audrey’s lecture on wormhole theory, the entire neighborhood is plunged into one, swapping places with a section of land from 65 million years ago. While the family initially believes the power has just gone out, they go back to sleep before awakening the next morning to the truth.

One thing I really admire is that while the kids have the survival instinct of a moth diving into a volcano, Hathaway and McGregor act as fully rational adults throughout the film. When they see the first velociraptor, they immediately board themselves into the house, covering up the windows and doors, and locking down every way a dinosaur could get in. When their neighbor is being eaten by pteranodons on his roof, they do not stupidly try to intervene and instead watch him die while tearing up. When fighting the titanoboa, Hathaway does not stop stabbing it until it is gone, keeping it up for a full minute. While the dialogue can be a little rough, and it’s hard to care much about the kid characters beyond them being kids, the two adults really work in providing characters you desperately want to make it out alive.

I really enjoyed the design of the dinosaurs in this movie – they don’t look very similar to Jurassic Park, and while the CGI is perhaps a tad less convincing than the $250m movie Jurassic World Rebirth, the modest $80m budget is well utilized in the visual effects. They look different and distinct, perhaps more akin to how dinosaurs looked in the old black-and-white horror movies of the early 20th century. I loved the take on velociraptors, having them essentially be giant chicken with teeth (as modern science suggests) rather than tiny T-Rexes folks are familiar with from Jurassic Park. I also enjoyed seeing both crocodiles and alligator snapping turtles both virtually unchanged from their present forms, as they have had no need for evolution over the last 65 million years.

The horror aspect of the movie is not as strong as I would like, although there is one scene in particular that had me on the edge of my seat the entire time. The scene with the titanoboa, which unfortunately was a real creature, was one of the scariest scenes in a movie I’ve seen in a while, and had me on the literal edge of my seat, grasping the armrests and holding my breath. Incredibly well-paced, with perfect suspense and action, it did also drew attention to how little weight some of the other scenes, like the pteranodons, had. Thankfully, despite several dino encounters, the family dog Starbuck makes it out in one piece and without being harmed at the end – this was very important information for us to know going in.

I will not spoil the ending here, but it felt very tacked on, as if some focus test audience or perhaps studio executives did not like the original ending. McGregor himself admitted that the original cut of the film was much bleaker and darker, and having read what that ending would look like, I’m glad they chose to go with this one, even if it felt awkward. Despite its less-than-stellar script, The End of Oak Street manages to capture the good-feel moments of Spielberg’s early work like Close Encounters of the Third Kind and E.T. while grabbing at some semblance of the ferocity of Jurassic Park. The fashions and hairstyles perfectly encapsulate the late ’70s and early ’80s in a refreshingly nostalgic way. Excellent directing, shot composition, and suspense carry the movie to a must-see recommendation for all fans of dinosaurs and Amblin Entertainment alike.

Score: 8/10 – Excellent

Nirav Recommends The End of Oak Street