Josh Reviews The End of Oak Street

It’s 1982, and the Platt family seems like a perfect American family, living nestled in the idyllic suburbs.  But this family’s happy-perfect facade masks unhappiness and secrets within, all of which spills out when dinosaurs attack and they find themselves fighting for their lives.

The End of Oak Street was written and directed by David Robert Mitchell.  (This is the first film I’ve seen by Mr. Mitchell, even though I’m interested in all three of his previous films — The Myth of the American Sleepover, It Follows, and Under the Silver Lake — and I hope to find time to see all those movies soon.  But the prospect of big-screen dinosaur mayhem lured me into the movie theater to see this one.)

I had fun eating popcorn and watching The End of Oak Street.  There’s plenty of the expected dinosaur mayhem, and the visual effects bringing the monsters to life are strong, as is the cast, anchored by Anne Hathaway and Ewan McGregor.

Unfortunately, the movie kept reminding me of other, better movies, mostly helmed by Stephen Spielberg.  There’s nothing in this movie that comes close to the visceral terror (or joy) of Jurassic Park, made by Mr. Spielberg many decades ago.  Part of the problem, I think, is that this movie is full of little short moments of dinosaur action, but we never settle into a truly great, extended sequence.  There’s a cool moment, in the middle of this movie, in which our characters are in a car, fleeing a dinosaur, and they crash into the living room of a house, and they’re stuck in the car in between a ravenous dinosaur on one side and the house, which has caught fire.  I perked up at this moment, excited by this cool set-up.  And it is a cool moment!  But it’s just a moment; it’s over in a minute.  Compare that to the extended terror of the T-Rex attack in Jurassic Park, and the whole sequence in which Alan Grant (the late, great Sam Neill’s character) is trying desperately to get the kids out of the smashed car.  There’s nothing in The End of Oak Street that comes within a mile of that bravura sequence.  The idea of a family’s interpersonal conflicts coming to light in the middle of a fantasy adventure is a strong idea, and many movies have used that device to great success.  But here too, I was far more invested in the character stories found in movies like E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial or Close Encounters of the Third Kind than I was by anything in The End of Oak Street.  I wish this film had dug a little deeper into these characters and their individual journeys over the course of this adventure.  This story and these characters wound up being more superficial than I’d expected (and hoped).

But is it unfair to say this movie isn’t as great as some of the best all-time movies made by one of the greatest directors of all time?  Perhaps!

I did enjoy this film.  The actors playing the four members of the Platt family were all great.  Anne Hathaway steals the show as Denise, who has aspirations of being a writer and finds herself feeling suffocated by her boring suburban life and unreliable husband.  Ms. Hathaway does a terrific job in drawing the audience into her feelings of being trapped, even as we might question whether she really has things so bad and if she could perhaps have a little more empathy for her husband.  Ms. Hathaway is also terrific at playing both terrified and strong at the same time.  This is a great performance!  Ewan McGregor, meanwhile, manages to balance keeping his character Greg on the right side of likable, while we see that he’s something of a doofus, and he keeps blowing off the things Denise asks him to do, oh and he’s been lying to her about having lost his job.  I like that the film doesn’t side too much with either Denise or Greg, and both Ms. Hathaway and Mr. McGregor play their characters’ flaws while also making sure we’ll be rooting for them when the dinosaurs attack.  The two kids are also great: Maisy Stella and Christian Convery are both terrific as the Platt kids, Audrey & Brian.  They both feel like real kids, which can be hard to do sometimes in a movie like this.  I wish the script didn’t make Brian do something so eye-rollingly stupid mid-movie (wandering out of the safety of his house to go look for his dog), but that’s not the actor’s fault.

There’s not much more to the cast.  We meet a few other neighbors, and one other important kid (the neighbor Jeannette, played by Jordan Alexa Davis), but we don’t really get to know any of them.  I wonder if the movie would be stronger if any of these other characters had been better developed.  It might have been helpful for us to get to know and like some of these other characters, only to then watch them get picked off as the movie unfolds.  I think that would have added to the tension and drama.  The film makes the choice to focus squarely on the family of the four Platts.  We hear on the soundtrack other people fighting and presumably dying outside the Platt home, but we don’t see much of that.  Was this for budgetary reasons?  There are a few shots in which we see that the neighborhood being menaced by dinosaurs isn’t just one block but a pretty large group of streets, so I questioned why we didn’t see what happened to more of those other people in the film.

The dinosaurs look terrific.  I like the choices made in the depiction of the dinosaurs.  They went with a more feathered look as opposed to lizard-like scales.  This (I think) accurately represents changes in what scientists have learned since the Jurassic Park days; it also gives these dinos a different look and feel.  That all works.  I like that we get to see a bunch of different types of dinosaurs.  (Part of me wishes there was a character like Alan Grant, or even the kid Tim, from Jurassic Park, who could have told us a bit about these different dinosaurs we’re seeing in the film; that might have helped make the different dinos more distinct and memorable.  On the other hand, I respect that Mr. Mitchell stuck to the core concept that this is a totally normal, average American family at the heart of this adventure, and these guys wouldn’t know thing-one about any of these dinosaurs.)

Michael Giacchino’s score is strong (albeit without a memorable central theme, a complaint I have about so many movie scores these days).  I enjoyed the playfulness Mr. Mitchell employed in his filmmaking at times in the film, such as the tense family conversation on the floor of their house, in which he employs a split-diopter to keep the figures on both sides of the frame in focus.  The film doesn’t shy away from giving us some dark, brutal moments, while in general keeping the tone of a tense adventure that doesn’t become too dour or nihilistic.  I appreciated how Mr. Mitchell struck that balance in tone.

If you think a movie about dinosaurs menacing a suburban family sounds like fun, you’re probably going to enjoy this movie.  I had fun watching it, though I doubt it’s a film I’ll be rushing to re-watch any time soon.  But bravo to Mr. Mitchell for creating an original fantasy adventure movie, not based on any pre-existing IP — we need more of these!!  I’m glad to have seen this.

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