While cinematic tradition usually has no issue showing off CGI animals, monsters, aliens, or demons, it’s interesting to consider how many big-budget dinosaur movies there actually are with this release of The End of Oak Street.
Though Jurassic Park may have a stranglehold on the box office’s love for these scaly predators, it’s surprising that no one else ever even tries. Outside of Peter Jackson’s 2005 remake of King Kong and the middling Adam Driver-led sci-fi movie from 2023, 65, there have been no larger budget dinosaur movies that are not included within the (far too long-running) Jurassic Park franchise.
So, with the Jurassic movies seemingly on their way out from a critical perspective, what else might satisfy our innate need to see these terrifying monsters of our past within a genuinely human story that isn’t always about billion-dollar corporations?
That’s where director David Robert Mitchell came in. Coming off of the 2014 horror hit It Follows and then into the strange cult-devoted weirdness of underground LA with 2018’s Under the Silver Lake, it seems fitting to have a director with success in effective scares and abrupt abnormality to give us this sci-fi thriller geared around a 1980s neighborhood suddenly transported to the Cretaceous period.
The End of Oak Street settles us in with a classic 1980s block party, full of neighbors, grilling, water balloons; your quintessential summer fun. Meeting the Platt family here with Denise (Anne Hathaway), Greg (Ewan McGregor), Brian (Christian Convery), and Audrey (Maisy Stella) allows a quick window into their respective lives before everything is suddenly upended. What I initially appreciated about this was that it was a family drama first, sci-fi thriller second.
Though, for as much as the thrill and shock of this perspective shift works, it ultimately left me still searching for that important human story buried within all the chaos. Dinosaurs are an easy trade for style over substance, but when it results in constantly repetitive sequences with bland writing and rushed plotting, you begin to wish the dinosaurs would just take a backseat for a second.
It comes down to how Mitchell handled the tricky tone on this one. It seems to have a difficult time balancing the brutality, horror, abrupt sorrow, and summer movie fun to make one cohesive experience about this family’s survival. Upon arrival into this dangerous new time period, Mitchell does not easily skirt around the ferocity of these creatures that chase and hunt to quite an effective end. Still, it still seems to want that Spielberg-esque sense of adventure that clearly carried movies like Jurassic Park to its beloved status by all ages.
But, between the repetitive meanness of these dino-murders and the lack of development for these characters or this mystery, it finds itself in this limbo of simplified action cinema with little to no emotional stakes, even though Mitchell certainly tries to force them. It certainly can be easy to get wrapped up in the eerie intimidation of these dinosaurs, but we really should be pushing for the connections lying underneath to give us more thematic and emotional depth.
Along with an ending that has a lot more ramifications (time-travel and otherwise) than it cares to comment on, The End of Oak Street had me momentarily immersed, but souring the further away I was from it. For as divergent Mitchell’s earlier films can be, this one has a more studio-tinged quality that seems as if it didn’t allow for anything too bold to be infused to make this something of his own. I could be wildly off base with Warner Brothers giving full control to Robert Mitchell for this effort, but I just had a hard time seeing an auteur’s vision and control within this sci-fi event.
I do hope that people still get out to the movies for their summer dinosaur fix, but I’ll certainly be interested to see the general reaction to this, and if it really did work on a level I just didn’t feel. For now, I may still just stick with that 1993 reigning champ.
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