You're not gonna believe this, but I think somebody's emu got loose

THE END OF OAK STREET

2026

Written and directed by David Robert Mitchell

Spoilers: mild

There's eventually a more instrumental explanation, but until then about the only reason I could imagine that The End of Oak Street happens in 1982 is because it simply prefers to be.  For its makers would like you to think of it in nostalgic terms: of bygone summers when reasonably well-heeled action-adventure films came out that you'd never heard of, and which maybe didn't even bother with a particularly descriptive name, but on the strength of a high concept became the kind of righteous blockbuster people still remember fondly forty years down the line—in other words, something like an Amblin film.  Just not, you know, that Amblin film.  Some other Amblin film.  So for all I know the biggest reason it's set in 1982, though it could've just as easily been set in 1989, is so none of its characters can be thinking of that Amblin film, or of the popular novel upon which it was based, because otherwise they'd be obliged to mention Jurassic Park, and that would be annoying.  Though by the same token they probably ought to be surprised by dinosaurs having feathers, potentially to the point of misidentifying their persecutors, when that would barely have been on a specialist's radar in 1982.

But Oak Street is at the work of Spielbergsploitation, make no mistake about that—Spielberg and the 80s having always been touchstones for producer J.J. Abrams—but then, I doubt you could make that mistake, given how aggressively its first few minutes establish its setting and gesture at its influences, plonking us down into this Georgia neighborhood (standing in for, apparently, Michigan, a fact of so much narrative consequence I don't know why it's not just Georgia) that has served as a refugium for the architectural styles of the 80s suburb, to which the movie has dutifully reintroduced all the kids on bikes and sunny photography and fractured nuclear families necessary for the maintenance of its ecology.  Above all, there's Michael Giacchino assailing us with one extreme replication of the kind of 80s Amblin cues that say "BEHOLD! NORMALCY," which occupy a fairly long stretch of movie before the plot allows the composer to wend his way into anything less templated; though the sheer amount of score here, and its value to the film's narrative, could be reasonably held to be "of" the 80s (or the early 90s), regardless of particular stylings.

Obviously, we and the movie's makers all still exist in a universe with Jurassic Park, so if I were to suppositionally reconstruct the reason this movie exists, it would in fact be a certain dissatisfaction with one of the paradoxes of the modern film industry which Jurassic Park helped birth: a film franchise that makes a billion dollars per installment despite nobody seeming to actually like them, yet with hardly anybody even tentatively attempting to contest the Jurassic Park rightsholders' de facto monopoly on the entirely non-protectable concept of "fucking dinosaurs."  (Or, if you're an insufferable pedant, "fucking prehistoric reptiles."*)  It's a strategy that feels double-edged for writer-director David Robert Mitchell, once thought to be one of our up-and-comers, thanks to 2014's It Follows, but who's been languishing—with eight years gone by now—since the alienating perplexity and box office burial of his 2018 art thriller Under the Silver Lake.  On the one hand, though I'm clearly biased, I don't know if I could identify a better way to reestablish yourself as a bankable filmmaker without selling your soul to the IP mills than tapping that underserved "fucking dinosaur" market; on the other, there's a reason studios have been hesitant, which is mainly because American filmgoers are mushbrained cowards cleaving always to the devil they know, whereas even with a comparatively hedged bet (at around $90 million, Oak Street is effectively "mid-budget"), in 2026, far more than in 1925 or 1966, "fucking dinosaurs" requires a great deal of money to realize, so you need at least modest blockbuster returns for it to be hailed a success.  Look no further than 65, the only major exception to other studios' abandonment of 186 million years of deep time to Universal.  (Yes, one of these days I need to catch up with Primitive War, a notable victim of that abandonment, compelled into a small-budget independent production yet reputedly an honorable film despite this.)  Now, one key difference between 65 and Oak Street is that 65 was a complete piece of shit—that its VFX artists didn't appear to have even a vague, pop cultural idea of what "dinosaurs" should look and act like was one of its smallest problems—while Oak Street is pretty awesome, albeit, I'm afraid, awesome with some very aggravating caveats.

But even if Mitchell somehow did not actually do it on purpose, though I absolutely believe he did, it's hard to imagine anybody making more of an anti-Jurassic Park than this, starting just with the very basic stat of Oak Street being a 2026 movie with a 99 minute runtime, and then, despite that slim runtime or possibly because of that slim runtime managing to deliver characters of at least sufficient interest to follow their adventure through a nebulously Mesozoic food web.  It turns out you can free up a ton of space by cutting bait on the narrative complexity that Jurassic Park movies think is useful; Oak Street instead justifies its human encounters with dinosaurs with some wormhole-based time travel that it never even feints towards explaining any more deeply than I just did** (which is more 80s than the 80s were).  It also cuts bait on the thematic "complexity," and while I don't begrudge Spielberg or Michael Crichton so much for asking "if we have our hubristic antagonist make his own King Kongs, does that mean we get to do a Frankenstein for free?", I do begrudge that with (most of) its sequels, which have had the worst tendency to believe that this question was what made Jurassic Park good.

So, on a fundamental level (though unfortunately not uniformly), Oak Street's mission is being smart about being stupid, which I almost invariably prefer to pretension; hence this is probably the best movie about dinosaurs to come out in the last quarter century.  But the last item on that "not Jurassic Park" list is probably the most important thing that sets Oak Street in diametric opposition to it, since its answer to the all-encompassing question "what is dinosaur cinema for?" is the one I think that we all agree on: "dinosaurs are cool and it's cool when dinosaurs eat people."  Less glibly, it's for making a movie about putting humans in existential conflict with the horrors of nature without having so much as the tenuous connections that a regular animal attack movie bears to real ecological and moral concerns.  Oak Street's dinosaurs are, accordingly, not figures of wonder, only horror—hell, they're figures of such pure malevolence that it beggars belief, and a 99 minute runtime can be an infirmity, too—and I'm convinced that "anti-Jurassic Park" just had to have been the watchword, especially when the scene that most resembles a Spielbergian sense of wonder is a crass, stupid parody of the specific corresponding scene and the specific corresponding emotions in Jurassic Park, nonetheless providing one of the most memorable images of this film, and immediately thereafter, the principals are brutally punished for letting down their guard long enough to laugh at it.  For despite some discussion of the subject prompted by their circumstances, there's no God in Oak Street, just animals, some of whom we care about.

It does have a story, then.  So: back in 1982, we find the Platt family, mom Denise (Anne Hathaway), dad Greg (Ewan McGregor), elder daughter Audrey (Maisy Stella), and younger son Brian (Christian Convery), who all have their own deals, Brian being, a little ironically, the most stereotypical protagonist for this kind of film—good-hearted-but-troubled 80s adventure boy—and Audrey being a science nerd—so she can explain what Carl Sagan said about wormholes once—and Denise and Greg being more interesting than either of their children and receiving more interest from their narrative in return, which kind of flips that "80s movie" thing around.  Greg turns out to have over-optimstically concealed the fact that he's been unemployed for weeks and that his side-hustle as a pizza delivery driver is actually their family's sole source of income; Denise turns out to have been a dissatisfied housewife for, like, the entire time, frustrations which she's dealt with by secretly writing the great American self-insert novel in the basement but so unwilling to have a conversation about these feelings that she's never even mentioned her ambitions to be a writer to her family.  A first act patiently situates us within this family dynamic as it unravels—the d-word comes up (er, the other d-word)—before sci-fi fiat flings the entire neighborhood into one very undifferentiated primordial past, though in fairness the smaller wormholes that occasionally continue popping up suggest that there could be some substantial mixing and matching.  The upshot is that when they venture outdoors to investigate what they think is a power outage, they find first geological upheaval (they've been transported to the foot of an active volcano, which is just such a nicely hoary touch) and then the fauna of their new environment, initially in the form of a ferociously-determined feathered theropod, but Oak Street never runs out of terror to throw at the Platts, in part because this newly-colonized stretch of two square miles has already become home to roughly a hundred predatory dinosaurs twice the size of a man or larger (plus predatory ptersoaurs one-tenth the size of a man or smaller, but still pretty insistent on trying to eat the guy).

What I don't want to make it sound like is that Oak Street is inhumane, even with spectacle being far and away its primary goal, and for what it is it's a fairly emotionally-rich scenario it's whipped up here to magnify its family drama about flawed regular people.  So another way it's an anti-Jurassic Park (though I should, speaking properly now, say anti-Jurassic World) is that unlike any of those World-branded Jurassics, it benefits immensely from its lead performances.  It happens that both its principals have committed wholeheartedly to this screenplay's urgent need to pursue both its family drama and its life-and-death dino-stakes simultaneously, and Hathaway's whole heart, especially, is just plain bigger, or at least more obviously on display, so that 2026 might be the year that "raw, fearless emotionalism" becomes my expected baseline for Hathaway rather than a surprise; either way, it's one of the most livewire and persuasive exercises in look-at-the-tennis-ball acting in ages, afforded the material, thanks to a movie that is practically just a machine for animal attack cruelty, to go through every conceivable grade of terror and misery and grief whilst believably taking potshots at allosaurs in her bathrobe, but also given neat technical challenges like conveying the relatively-complicated psychology of Denise intellectually setting aside the destruction of her novel's manuscript despite this very obviously being a profound loss in any other circumstance and which still clearly upsets her more than e.g. the apparent demise of her son's dog.  (And the kids are very secondary, but it's not solely Hathaway and McGregor: Stella gets a startlingly good scene of pure texture, very stupid but humanely stupid, regarding wasting a car's battery listening to basically the full length of "Valerie" and contemplating the loss of her entire world.)

And for all the inherent goodness of that, this is also blatantly one of Oak Street's two serious weaknesses.  It's trying so hard to reflect the interpersonal foibles that have ruined its principals' marriage (Greg's loser avoidance, Denise's resentful fatalism, two sides of the same coin) into their approach to the dinosaur crisis, that for a stretch of movie going on twenty minutes it feels awfully brittle and silly, that the aforementioned crisis has not entirely succeeded in putting their marital discord on the backburner, and only ultimately manages to because eventually there's no longer any downtime between the setpieces.  Though it's something, anyway, that Greg's idiotically hopeful plan, "let's wait until God/the universe zaps us back to A.D. 1982" would be the one that entails the divorce he doesn't want, while, despite her being the first mover on that, Denise's insistence that they're stuck in 200,000,000 B.C. forever is an argument for a future where "divorce" would be, as a practical matter, a non sequitur.

That's even clever, but I truly can't say how intentional that could've been, when it points in the direction of Oak Street's silently ginormous problem, which is much less forgivable than a genre film merely going for artfulness and winding up with a measure of tacky artifice instead; no, that's a genre film insisting on humanity that, in its telling, verges on accidental satire, if not some outright accidental sociopathy.  I've run across the theory that Oak Street's first drafts simply didn't have anybody besides the Platts, and the idea certainly feels unassailable going by the results of an Oak Street that seems sufficiently committed to the idea of "a neighborhood" that it introduces us to numerous neighbors, before spending its last hour so entirely indifferent to those neighbors that the Platts make literally no attempt to make contact with them, which also seems to be the non-strategy the neighborhood's other 200-400 inhabitants are taking (the single exception to the Platts' disregard is already a corpse when contact is made, and just an exigence for the first setpiece anyway), so if they ever do meet up with their neighbors again, it's in random encounters due solely to some other plot-greasing foolishnesses, which only make sense if you remember that most Mesozoic atmospheric regimes had toxic levels of carbon dioxide.  I'm always sympathetic to a movie narrowing its focus to what matters to it, but this is a pervasive distraction and a palpable drag on the story logic.  Obviously you want your lovely suburb overrun with dinosaurs, I get that; but if you don't want the people who live there, then can we at least consider rescheduling that block party for 8 a.m the morning after?  Because at least then we'd be explaining our disorganized, alienated chaos with a pretty fun scene.

But then, Oak Street already offers the Goddamn motherlode of "fun scenes"—or thrilling scenes, or harrowingly fucking horrible scenes, all these being synonyms here—starting, indeed, with the morning after, with the adult Platts wandering through their neighborhood recognizing the uncanniness that's already settled upon things without being able to put their finger on exactly what's wrong until Greg spies a shadow coming down an alley that becomes a whole string of teases of what we know damn well is going to be a raptor bent on human destruction, but that's the fun of it; and, whatever screenplay weaknesses we want to whine about, ultimately Oak Street's main goal is to deliver the ideas that Mitchell came up with about how to make dinosaurs incredibly fucking cool and scary again.  (And split-diopters, likewise, so let's admire Mitchell's rebellion against the plague of shallow focus and his generation of filmmakers' indifference to the shape of a 'Scope ratio frame.)  Obviously, Mitchell's not out to totally reinvent the wheel: the star players remain the theropods, including a spinosaur apparently jealous of his tyrannosaur cousin's famous jeep scene, and especially a heartstopper of a sequence with an allosaur that makes its claim to being the best scene in any dinosaur movie ever, so I oughtn't spoil it (I ultimately like the film's time-twister ending, because there's no reason this fake 80s movie shouldn't do real 80s movie wish-fulfilment, but while I could be talked into thinking it cheapens this scene, it's not a thought one's likely to have in the moment it's happening).

Best, then, to consider a scene rather less vulnerable to being ruined by being described, which also has the benefit of emphasizing how varied the setpieces wind up in a film where, inevitably, every setpiece is basically the same thing over and over; but for every adrenaline-soaked sequence built out of long mobile takes of the neighborhood with the movie's just-good-enough-and-not-a-penny-more VFX monsters composited into them, there's another that's about suspense (so that a potential third serious weakness, I suppose, is that Oak Street somewhat feels like its early drafts were also about this neighborhood's deaf family, but the director of It Follows is obviously going to have his particular bag of tricks), and the ne plus ultra of the suspense that Oak Street's bringing undoubtedly belongs to a dizzy, even comic sequence—perversely so, considering where it lands, structurally—involving a titanoboa, so I misled you when I implied we were even limiting this shit to "the Mesozoic," infiltrating a human house.  It thus provides the singular imagery of a giant toothy teal tube so freakishly long that the film must take recourse to cross-cutting, across entirely different parts of the house, simply to contemplate its stalking of its prey and the Platts' eventual battle against it.  So whatever's wrong with Mitchell's screenplay, and the things that are wrong with it aren't that bad, just kind of constant, Mitchell has still made a pretty grand adventure-horror in the land of the lost; the kind of movie I feel like the movies have been in desperate need of, and for absolute eons at this point.

Score: 8/10

*For, technically, as with the Jurassic Worlds, we can't even say "archosaurs."

**A purity which Oak Street's marketing campaign seems to have had serious trouble with, to the point that merely misrepresenting the movie's bare-bones premise isn't the worst part of it (once you realize that the TV soundbyte about "a military quarantine" that gets used in one of the ads has not shown up by the point they go back in time, it automatically becomes a pretty fucking big spoiler).