The End of Oak Street, and I have some mixed feelings…
4 out of 10.. we will justify why..
First things first: SPOILERS. Lots of them. We’re basically going to spoil the entire movie here, so read at your own peril.
I went into this movie expecting something closer to a horror comedy. Instead, the comedic value was surprisingly low, the suspense was actually pretty high, and at certain points the whole thing somehow felt more like a really expensive direct-to-streaming movie than a major summer theatrical release.
I will say a plus here: JJ Abrams and company allowed us to really enter a world where it seemed feasible that dinosaurs would attack humans, and how they would be without mercy in their eating habits..
Anne Hathaway and Ewan McGregor lead the cast, alongside Maisy Stella and Christian Convery. Hathaway has been a star in huge movies.. McGregor as well.. .
JJ Abrams is one of the producers through Bad Robot, the company behind projects connected to Lost, Cloverfield, Star Trek and Mission: Impossible. And the movie was actually written and directed by David Robert Mitchell, the filmmaker behind It Follows. So there are a lot of people involved here who know how to make a movie.
All of that is star-studded..
Which makes some of the decisions in The End of Oak Street even stranger.
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SPOILER ALERT
Let’s start with what I liked most: the dinosaurs.
The violence of the T-Rex was fantastic, and there was something genuinely frightening about the quiet surveillance of the Titanboa stalking Anne Hathaway’s character until eventually it is almost right behind her. For real–this may have actually been the scene of the film with tension and silence. It worked perfect..
The dinosaurs, for the most part, looked shockingly good. I actually thought the visual effects were one of the strongest parts of the movie.
Except the dog.
I don’t know what happened with that dog. Maybe they couldn’t put an actual dog through everything required for the scene, but whatever combination of CGI or digital effects they settled on looked amateur compared to the eloquence of the dinosaurs..
And now let’s just cut to the biggest spoiler of all:
They kill Dad.
Of course they kill Dad. They kill Dad in pretty much every movie anymore, so why not this one too?
Except there’s a twist. And if you really want to know the ending, everything ultimately turns out okay.
Happy ending, I guess?
The basic concept is actually pretty interesting. We’re in 1982, meaning there are no cell phones, no internet and very limited ways of figuring out what is happening. When things start going wrong, you’re relying on radios .. and during this movie even the radio isn’t picking anything up, of course.
Eventually we learn that some sort of cosmic event or wormhole has essentially ripped Oak Street out of 1982 and thrown the neighborhood into a prehistoric world.. At least soon to be dead-dad theorizes this and his son agrees while the others doubt.. It turns out it was true. They knew a light was from something, so it HAS TO BE the wormhole..
Despite dad nailing it, the dinosaur also bit his leg off and devoured him in front of his shocked family.. as a dad I guess I take personal offense to this death scene.
There are also a lot of references to Cornell University and Carl Sagan through the daughter, Audrey. Eventually she gets her happy ending too, complete with the Cornell shirt. Of course, before getting there she has to experience the minor inconvenience of watching her entire town get destroyed and her father get eaten by a dinosaur.
College admissions essays should practically write themselves after that. But here’s where I had one of my biggest problems with the movie: the marriage.
Dad is certainly flawed. He’s secretly lost his main job, he’s working side jobs trying to keep the family afloat, he’s hiding things from his wife, and he’s taking a sips of whiskey and apparently reeks of alcohol when dinosaurs attack–mom decides to ask during the end of the world why he drank..
Meanwhile, Mom has apparently written an entire manuscript about leaving him and leaving the family.
And when the basement floods and the manuscript is destroyed, her misery factor goes through the roof.
Lady, DINOSAURS ARE EATING YOUR NEIGHBORS.
Your husband and children could die at any moment. Your entire neighborhood has apparently been sucked through some sort of cosmic wormhole and deposited into prehistoric hell, and we’re having an existential crisis over the manuscript about abandoning the family?
It just felt incredibly self-centered. That’s why I had trouble liking Anne Hathaway’s character for a large portion of the movie.
The film seems to want us to understand the breakdown of this marriage, but sometimes it felt as though the marriage problems mattered more to these people than the impending extinction of everyone around them.
Eventually she gets her redemption, realizes she can save everybody through a phone booth, and things improve considerably for her husband’s fate..
And somehow we’re eventually going to have to explain to Dad why there’s photographic evidence of him standing there giving a thumbs-up in front of two dinosaurs having sex.
Which brings us to THAT scene.
This is a PG-13 movie, so apparently we’re not going to have sex scenes between humans.
The dinosaurs, however?
The dinosaurs got it on. And they didn’t just give us a quick two-second visual joke and move along.
Oh no. We got angles, movement, and noises..
We got considerably more information about prehistoric reproductive behavior than I was expecting when I bought my ticket to the point where I felt somewhat vile afterward.
There are other moments that help redeem the movie. The crazy loon neighbor swinging a gun around and indiscriminately shooting before eventually being attacked by pterodactyls was entertaining. He kind of a Murray-ish role from Stranger Things. So was the surprise attack involving the librarian blowing away the prehistoric alligator-like creatures before they could devour him.
When The End of Oak Street embraces the insanity of its premise, it’s actually great.
It’s when it tries to make the collapsing marriage the emotional center of everything that I started checking out.
And then there’s the son. This poor kid gets the shaft.
The girl he’s apparently in love with ends up being interested in his sister instead. That angle gets thrown into the story too, and considering we’re talking about 1982, good luck to everybody involved navigating that situation once they get home.
But here’s where I think the movie missed its biggest opportunity.
I wanted a crazier ending.
Imagine they finally go through the wormhole except instead of simply restoring everything, Oak Street lands in 2026.
These people walk outside dressed like it’s 1982, completely bewildered by what they’re seeing, while everyone standing around the neighborhood immediately pulls out a cell phone and starts recording them.
Or go even further.
What if they arrived in 2026 and discovered that their older selves already existed there? Suddenly you’ve got this bizarre Back to the Future situation where the younger versions of these people are meeting the lives they were supposed to have.
Or, better yet, give us one final shot.
Everything is fixed.
Everyone is safe.
The portal closes.
Happy music.
Camera pans toward the trees.
ROAR.
One dinosaur made it through.
CUT TO BLACK.
That’s the ending I wanted.
Instead, J.J. Abrams, David Robert Mitchell and company decided to send us home feeling reasonably good about everything. Dad’s okay. The family apparently has another chance. The daughter has her Cornell future. Oak Street survives.
Happiness somehow pervades the bleak landscape of this once dinosaur-infested town.
And that’s fine.
I just wanted something a little more daring.
So all in all, I’m going 4 out of 10 for The End of Oak Street.
It’s not terrible. There are actually some really good suspense sequences, the dinosaurs look surprisingly fantastic, and there are enough completely insane moments to keep you entertained. But the plot is goofy, the emotional center didn’t work for me, some of the characters came across as bizarrely self-absorbed considering DINOSAURS WERE ACTIVELY EATING PEOPLE, and for a movie with this cast, this budget and this much talent behind the scenes, it sometimes strangely felt like something made for streaming.
Still, this is one I’d say you should see once in a theater, because the dinosaur sequences and visual effects benefit from the big screen.
After that?
Stream it when it’s free.
THE HORROR REPORT RATING: 4/10
