OVERVIEW
The End of Oak Street opens on a beautiful day on a suburban street in 1982, a time when life was easier, when families spent their days together playing outside. For the Platts, things are not as peachy, as Denise and Greg have been experiencing difficulties in their marriage, which is also evident to their two children. Meanwhile, weird things start to appear around the block: first a prehistoric plant in a neighbor’s yard, then a huge pile of dino-poop. Finally, in the middle of the night, a massive flash of light wakes the family. When the Platts look out their window, they discover that their entire neighborhood has been transported back to the age of dinosaurs.
BACKGROUND
Possibly one of the last original films greenlit under Michael De Luca and Pam Abdy while Warner Bros. was still part of Warner Bros. Discovery, The End of Oak Street was quite a bet for the studio. Before the film, director David Robert Mitchell had made only three low-budget features, with just one finding anything close to mainstream success: the cult horror hit It Follows. Still, Warner Bros. gave him an $80 million budget for an original science fiction film. It now arrives in a year when every one of the studio’s releases has underperformed, with the company itself in the process of being sold to Paramount Skydance.
The idea came to Mitchell while walking through his Michigan neighborhood and imagining how strange it would be to suddenly see a dinosaur standing there. Looking to recapture the magic of films and television such as Poltergeist, The Twilight Zone and, most evidently, Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park, Mitchell partnered with J.J. Abrams and shot the film for IMAX. Ironically, few audiences will actually get to experience it that way, with The Odyssey still occupying those screens.
THE REVIEW
For its first act, The End of Oak Street comes surprisingly close to recapturing the mixture of Spielbergian wonder and Joe Dante mischief Mitchell is going for. He follows the familiar checklist closely, establishing the Platts’ ordinary suburban life, the tension in Denise and Greg’s marriage, convincing childhood banter, and a mystery that develops as strange things begin to appear around them. He understands the pleasure of watching the impossible slowly intrude on the familiar, and the first dinosaur sightings deliver exactly what one hopes for from this kind of film. The wonder of the discovery, punctuated by an immensely cool shot revealing the edge of the street, is balanced by uneasiness as dinosaurs move in the distance, with Mitchell allowing only paws and tails into view at first.Once the dinosaurs become an active threat, however, the film starts to flounder. There is simply no propulsion to the action and very little sense of urgency. Mitchell often frames a suspense sequence correctly, using longer shots that allow the danger to develop within the frame, but the timing and behavior inside those shots rarely create suspense. Characters do not run with the intensity you would expect, dinosaurs suddenly abandon pursuits, and moments that appear to be building toward something frightening lose their tension halfway through.
There are also plenty of awkward and strange decisions by the characters. When Greg and Denise manage to get back into the house, they hold themselves against the door until Denise leaves Greg there and goes to the children. Wouldn’t they be better off putting their combined weight against it? The second the dinosaur gives up, Greg simply walks away without even bothering to lock the door. The family makes sensible choices, like nailing wood over the windows, but they do it as if they had all the time in the world, when they should be sweating, shaking, and constantly vigilant. These small details are what make suspense work, yet here the characters only seem to remember the danger when the narrative needs them to. There are constant screams coming from elsewhere, but we see little of the people transported with them, making the neighborhood feel strangely empty. The dinosaurs, and with them the danger, always feel far away, and when they do appear, they are usually outrun, outsmarted, or easily defeated. There are deaths in The End of Oak Street, but very little feeling that these characters are actually in danger.
One may blame the PG-13 rating, as a few moments certainly would have benefited from more gruesome sights, but as Spielberg has proved, we do not need to see carnage for dinosaurs to be frightening. That first major encounter needed to establish a threat that would carry into every subsequent moment the family stepped outside, yet the characters rarely react with enough desperation to sell it. The film’s combination of humor, horror, and family adventure only complicates matters, with the different tones awkwardly interrupting one another rather than working together to make the danger more exciting and the moments of relief more fun.
Most frustrating is the handling of Denise and Greg’s marriage, which initially seems positioned to give the adventure some thematic purpose. Their disagreement over whether to remain safely inside or venture out to find food creates a natural parallel to their relationship, particularly Denise’s exhaustion with a husband who is dishonest and has failed to move forward. The script never gives us a sense of the accumulated pain that brought this couple to that point, and when it runs out of things to say, it drops the parallel altogether and resolves the arc as cleanly as possible.Anne Hathaway nevertheless finds more in Denise than what is on the page. There is a tiredness in her expression that suggests some of the weariness the writing lacks, and she handles the possibility that Denise and Greg may never find their way back to each other with a maturity that hints at a more complex character. She is also great when the film gives her something physical to do, appropriately badass with a gun in her hands, making a good argument for Hathaway to sign up for more action and horror movies. Ewan McGregor is less successful and never quite lands the goofy, pathetic, lovable father these 1980s-style films depend on, despite having played variations of this before in Big Fish, I Love You Phillip Morris, and Salmon Fishing in the Yemen. He looks a little waxy, probably from a makeup job trying to hide his age, and he comes across as oddly uncommitted. His muted reactions to the danger only make an already insufficiently threatening situation feel even less urgent. The two child actors are fine with what they are given, though neither receives a worthy setpiece.
Technically, The End of Oak Street frequently looks and sounds like the movie Mitchell wants it to be. Michael Giacchino’s score draws on a familiar tradition, mixing instrumentation reminiscent of Jerry Goldsmith, the master of suburban horror, with the melodic warmth of James Horner and the horror techniques of John Williams, all filtered through the composer’s own approach to suspense, which inevitably recalls Lost. Mike Gioulakis does similar heavy lifting with the cinematography, making extensive use of split-diopter shots that keep characters in focus on one side while a dinosaur approaches from the other, generating suspense purely through what is visible in the frame. The special effects are equally convincing, with strong dinosaur designs and sound work that give the creatures a presence the direction too often fails to capitalize on.
FINAL THOUGHTS
There are still flashes where the film comes alive, particularly when it embraces the inherent silliness of putting an ordinary suburban family among dinosaurs. Dinosaurs eat ice cream from an ice cream truck, defecate in the neighborhood, and finally do something that creates a specific sight unlikely to be forgotten by anyone who sees it. When Mitchell simply goes for silly fun, The End of Oak Street can be quite enjoyable, which only makes the lack of excitement and suspense elsewhere more frustrating. It is cool to see Warner Bros. invest in an original idea, hand $80 million to a director with a distinctive voice, and take a chance on such a fantastic premise. Eighties nostalgia plus dinosaurs sounds like a good time, yet Mitchell only ever works out how those films should look and how their suspense should be framed. Much like the Jurassic World films, he fails to understand that simply having dinosaurs is not enough to make them exciting. Another dino-sized disappointment.