The best dinosaur movie since the first “Jurassic Park.”
Like last week’s horror bomb “Ice Cream Man,” “The End of Oak Street” begins with a sunny and almost happy community that never dreams of carnage happening within the next few days. The differences in “The End of Oak Street” are the year 1982, the PG-13 rating, and the fact that a bright white light sends an entire community to the prehistoric era. So, this is the better version of what we got last week. In fact, I think this movie, from the minds of writer/director David Robert Mitchell (“It Follows”) and producer JJ Abrams, is the best dinosaur movie I’ve seen since the first “Jurassic Park.”
I’ve been panning the recent “Jurassic World” movies for their repetitive formula of the villains being on the menu and characters making stupid choices. But “The End of Oak Street” is smart, emotional, funny, and thought-provoking, as if it wants to challenge the audience and succeeds in doing so.
We meet a family: the struggling breadwinner dad Gregg Platt (Ewan McGregor), the would-be author mom Denise (Anne Hathaway), their Carl Sagan fanatic daughter Audrey (Maisy Stella) , their athletic son Brian (Christian Convery), and their smart dog Starbuck (probably smarter than that French Canadian sperm donor we saw in the 2011 comedy “Starbuck”). For the next few nights, a few family members have been seeing a bright white light, up to the point of them losing power and water. But no hurricanes or transformer explosions have affected them.
Somehow, the whole neighborhood ends up back in the prehistoric era. That means dinosaurs can eat out of the garbage cans, a giant prehistoric snake can slither out of a pool, and pterodactyls can eat the Platts’ irritable neighbor (JP Byrne). But that doesn’t mean villains can take their DNA for profit.
A week before this film’s release, an online video regarding AI dogs using a podcast to promote it. And we all know it’s a terrible, considering that we need real people to promote real movies. But please don’t let that problem take you away from “The End of Oak Street.” Because the real movie is a winner. Instead of relying on Dino-sized Value Meals at McDonalds to sell it, it takes many chances at embracing the combination of time travel and dinosaurs.
Think of the split diopter shots used to angle the characters in their moments of examinations. Think of how the time paradox would help express the pathos already in the family’s lives. And think of the many angles Mitchell uses to tell a dinosaur story like this. It doesn’t need a big hero to save these people; it uses these people to save themselves. It takes many risks with the carnage and dialogue, even at its PG-13 rating. And it keeps us thinking about the possibilities this movie unfolds for us.
A few years ago, I was thinking back to “65,” which was a bad movie about a space explorer who ends up in the prehistoric era. He had the technology to tell him that the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs was en route, but it couldn’t tell him what these creatures were to begin with. That was a stupid movie about a stupid guy from I don’t know what time period. But “The End of Oak Street” is a smart movie about smart people from the 80s. That was way before “Jurassic Park” existed, and way after Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Lost World” was written in 1912.
How this family gets back to the 80s is almost as reminiscent and as exciting as Marty McFly on a race to save Doc Brown from getting shot in “Back to the Future.” Equally terrific acting work comes from Hathaway, McGregor, Stella, and Convery, because they succumb to no cliches and they resonate with people who would be in an impossible situation like this. That is if it is impossible. But time works in mysterious ways, so anything is possible. How else could that dinosaur crap in a neighbor’s lawn in 1982?
