“The End of Oak Street” is an 80s-homage dinosaur thriller that asks, “How would your family fare if your neighborhood was mystically transported to prehistoric times?”
The story centers around the seemingly all-American family, the Platts, who suffer from major communication issues.
Greg (Ewan McGregor) is the husband/father who is an optimist with hardly a foot in reality. Denise (Anne Hathaway) is the wife/mother who is much more pragmatic but has lost hope in their relationship. He lost his job and is secretly delivering pizza. She is an aspiring author who writes about a housewife ready to take off at any moment. Their teenage children, Audrey (Maisy Stella) and Brian (Christian Convery), can sense the tension but are afraid to confront their parents about it.
What better way to face your family’s problems than being thrust into a crucible where the only other option is to be eaten by dinosaurs? I’d suggest counseling, or an escape room.
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The importance of family
The movie proposes that a family who stays together can survive living among dinosaurs. In recent Catholic history, “The Rosary Priest,” Venerable Fr. Patrick Peyton, CSC (1909-1992), coined the phrase, “The family that prays together stays together.”
By the transitive property of mathematics, a family that prays together can survive living among dinosaurs.
However, the Platt family does not pray together. It is established that Greg sort of believes in God, Brian does, and Audrey and Denise don’t. God’s existence is not one of the main questions the movie considers, so when it is brought up, it feels out of place. Nevertheless, the family still splits off on their own misadventures and mostly stays alive with some incredible plot armor despite discussing early on that they need to stay together to survive.
It is expected that the characters are going to get separated in a movie like this, but how they get split up after they fully realize their predicament was unearned. Brian first leaves the house because he tries to collect his lost dog, Starbuck, and then Audrey leaves to find him shortly thereafter. It was amazing how all the carnivorous dinosaurs who were super-sensitive to sound suddenly didn’t hear the kids shouting in this sequence of events.
Communication can heal a family
Greg and Denise’s “new normal” forces them to confront their lack of communication. She discovers he has been keeping secrets about his moonlighting as a pizza delivery driver, and he reveals he read a draft of her book that shows she lives in quiet desperation.
Their fight makes them lose focus on keeping the family together, and they discover the kids are gone.
The search for the kids forces them to work together to escape death and leads them to discover a small wormhole. It disappears, but gives them hope that there can be a way out.
Greg and Denise encounter a stampede and take refuge in a sedan. They could have run to the right or the left, but being almost crushed to death by the dinosaurs solidifies their bond, and Denise knows that Greg will be with her until the end.
To relate this moment to the faith, Greg covers Denise and emulates Ephesians 5:25, “Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ loved the church and handed himself over for her.”
The unification of the spouses is short-lived. They reunite with the kids, take a comedic break to watch two brontosauruses engage in intercourse, and then Greg is eaten by an Allosaurus to save Denise.
Where it succeeded
“The End of Oak Street” achieved the aesthetic of a 1980s Steven Spielberg movie. The block party at the beginning of the movie sent you back to a time when everyone knew their neighbor, and people interacted without the distraction of cellphones.
Recent scientific discoveries suggest dinosaurs had feathers, so it was cool to see this aspect of dinosaurs depicted in the movie.
The acting was also really good. All the Platt family actors elevated what they were given and were also great at showing their thoughts through body language.
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Where it fell short
The movie’s pace was inconsistent, tone was imbalanced, and resolution was cheap.
At first, it was nice to take time with the characters to discover their predicament and explore their shock, but after too much lingering and too much “breaking the rules of the universe,” I found myself rooting for the dinosaurs.
The carnivores are set up to be unforgiving towards humans, but the main family (save one member) can almost be as loud as they want when other characters get attacked for much less.
The ending was also more horrifying than depicted if you think of the implications of the surviving character’s actions.
The movie ends with Denise, Audrey, Brian, Starbuck, and orphaned neighbor Jeanette (Jordan Alexa Davis) being transported back into 1982 about 20 minutes before the original blip. They land just outside of their neighborhood on a street with a pay phone and a big clock that shows them the time.
Jeannette runs to save her family. Denise stops the other kids and goes to the pay phone to make some collect calls. Some time passes, and none other than Greg drives up to deliver a pizza. He is confused about why his family is up there, but they all embrace him. The blip happens, and their neighborhood is swapped with a large patch of prehistoric land with an amount of dinosaurs that we later learn the U.S. military was able to contain.
The story fast-forwards two years, and the family is happily together. They have Jeanette’s family over for a cookout, and we see Jeanette’s parents walk into view with the other version of Jeanette. As this happens, a news report shows that Denise also called some of her neighbors and saved them from the blip. She is now a famous author who has written a book entitled The End of Oak Street (That’s the name of the movie!).
The ending plays happy, but if Greg and the other neighbors are saved, it means the other versions of Denise, Audrey, and Brian are doomed to die. Greg and the neighbors that originally died were integral to the family surviving and learning about the prehistoric environment.
It also means that the Greg we are left with does not have to go through any character development. Yes, the family is together at the end, but the resolution is too easy. It would have been more satisfying if the original Greg survived, perhaps with an injury or a missing leg, or if we got to see the family’s attempts at coping with his loss, knowing he risked his life for his family.
A third option could have been a more feral version of Denise appearing through a wormhole at the end, but that never happened.
Final Thoughts
“The End of Oak Street” has the elements of a great movie but falls flat in execution.
The director and writer, David Robert Mitchell, dedicated the movie to his dad, and you can tell the movie was made with heart and style.
Unfortunately, this movie falls into the “style over substance” category and cannot recover from its poor dialogue and cheap plot resolutions.
