The End of Oak Street
This is going to seem like a weird comparison, but I felt more nostalgia watching “The End of Oak Street” than I have watching either “Stranger Things,” or this summer’s “Masters of the Universe.” Don’t get me wrong- I enjoyed both of those things, but the nostalgia in David Robert Mitchell’s adventure thriller is different. Set in 1982, this is a film that made me truly feel like I was back in the ’80s. I remembered hanging out with friends in Ohio and Georgia, I remembered neighborhood get togethers, and I remembered the style of the time. It took me back to the house we lived in off of Virginia Drive in Ravenna, Ohio. That’s one of the most notable things about the film, however.
The Platt family seem like a normal American family in the early ’80s. We have father Greg (Ewan McGregor) and mother Denise (Anne Hathaway), and daughter Audrey (Maisy Stella) and son Brian (Christian Convery). Greg works hard, even doing some odd jobs to make more money, while Denise is a stay-at-home mother, though she’s admittedly stressed about the marriage, and is even writing a novel in her spare time. We get bullies and crushes, and annoying neighbors and older people we were friends with. It’s very suburban American. Over a couple of nights, some weird light flashes are happening, and some unusual things are coming up in the neighborhood, like plants from 200 million years ago and piles of manure. Then, one morning, they wake up, and their neighborhood has been transported seemingly back in time, and there’s dinosaurs. We have dinosaurs, ladies and gentlemen.
I remember going to a dinosaur exhibit at a museum when we were in Ohio, and it was amazing to imagine the real-life animals those bones hinted at. By 1993, we had dinosaurs on screen in “Jurassic Park,” and cinematic portrayals of dinosaurs have been codified ever since. Though I’m nominally a fan of the franchise as a whole, one of the big failings- for me- was how, after 2018’s “Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom” hinted at a world where dinosaurs and man coexisted in cities, neither of the movies after that really did anything with that premise- it just took us back to a damn island. Though there is not much to the narrative in “The End of Oak Street,” one of the things I’m very grateful for is giving us the sort of action the “Jurassic” movies have teased us with, without quite delivering. There are some strong set pieces in this film, especially one where a giant snake slithers around the house. It also gives us one of the sweetest, most ridiculous moments between two characters in a movie like this, where Greg and Denise bond over a once-in-a-lifetime moment they have to capture on Polaroid. And the payoff of that moment? Chef’s kiss; Mitchell knows the type of movie he’s making.
While the director of “It Follows” and “Under the Silver Lake” definitely understands the audience for this type of movie, that does not mean I think this is a very good movie. Hathaway is by far the human MVP, and while I like the touch of these dinosaurs having feathers and fur on them, ultimately, we do not see much we haven’t see before in a “Jurassic” movie. Yes, we get the novelty of dinosaurs in suburbia, but there’s not a lot he’s able to do with it, even though I appreciate the movie coming in at just around 100 minutes. As a late summer piece of escapism, it’ll find an audience that appreciates it, whether that’s people who do take the time to see it in theatres, or those who wait for it to his streaming. Either way, people will enjoy it, even if they don’t remember much of it long afterwards.
