For me, an icy beverage, a bucket of popcorn, and a dinosaur movie have always been a recipe for fun. So naturally when I saw the trailer for The End of Oak Street featuring dinosaurs running amok in suburbia, a ticket purchase was inevitable.
Film makers have been fascinated by these prehistoric creatures since the earliest days of the motion picture industry. Growing up I had ample material to watch, some of it good, and most of it entertainingly bad. It wasn’t until Jurassic Park (1993) that my mind was blown. Since then, there has not been a dino-movie that has come close to matching the intensity of that visceral experience. That is until this year’s release of The End of Oak Street!
Anne Hathaway (Ella Enchanted (2004), Interstellar (2014)) and Ewan McGregor (Star Wars: The Phantom Menace (1999), Christopher Robin (2018)) star as Denise and Greg Platt. They are a classic nuclear family with two kids, and a dog. They live in a typical suburban neighborhood of 1982. Why 1982, you might be asking yourself, and for that answer you needn’t look further than the popular Netflix series “Stranger Things”. 80’s nostalgia is the trendy trope that Hollywood is currently fetishizing. Painstaking effort went into making everything look natural for 1982, but it was not the least bit important to the plot.
Anyway, the story begins with a summer block party that introduces us to the Platts, and an assortment of their colorful neighbors (all soon to be dino-fodder). From there it is a slow build as we get acquainted with our Oak Street family. Strange little occurrences start happening, which we’ll call temporal tremors. Unexplained pockets of time shift from one period to another. Then one night a thunderstorm is accompanied by a massive temporal quake that transports the entire housing development to the prehistoric past. It’s almost dinosaur time.
After the shift of time happens the pace does pick up, but not as quickly as you might expect. Writer and director David Robert Mitchell (The Myth of the American Sleepover (2010), It Follows (2014)) embraces old school monster movie techniques by only giving us glimpses. Once the full reveal takes place then it’s off to the races; it’s dinosaur time! The suspense is palpable, frightening in a primeval way, and there are surprises that genuinely shocked me.
The End of Oak Street is brilliant in its simplicity. There is a moment in The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997) showing a T-Rex in someone’s backyard drinking from a swimming pool. Oak Street took that moment and turned it into a feature length thrill ride.
However, not everything about this dinosaur survival romp is praiseworthy. My chief complaint is about the resolution of this dino excursion. To achieve a happy ending, a paradox is created which I’ll address at another time (yes, pun intended).
In the meantime I give this a definite “claws up”.
