The End of Oak Street – shag pile

Remember a time before The Franchise had a near-monopoly on movie dinosaurs? Me neither. To avoid any references to the Crichton and Spielberg-spawned behemoth, you’d have to travel in time all the way back to the 1980s. And that seems like as good a reason as any to set the ‘modern day’ portions of any new dinosaur films during that decade – it’s the most recent era during which the characters can quite plausibly encounter Mesozoic beasties and not start spouting off about how much it reminds them of that movie with Goldblum in it. Surely, that’s why the creators of The End of Oak Street chose to set it in the ’80s. That, and the rad tunes.

The End of Oak Street is the latest film directed by David Robert Mitchell, whose previous works include It Follows and Under the Silver Lake – and it has both the 1980s and dinosaurs in it. In fact (as trailers and advance publicity have made very clear), the film sees an entire 1980s American suburb spontaneously teleported into the Mesozoic past, unceremoniously dumped in the middle of a forbidding jungle teeming with often rather hostile beasties. But when, exactly, in the Mesozoic are we talking? Well, as you might expect, it’s a little bit of a hodgepodge in terms of flora and fauna, a real anachronism stew you might say. The main thing is, there are dinosaurs, and plenty of ’em.

The plot focuses on an Average Family who are thrust into extraordinary circumstances. Their names are eminently forgettable and unimportant, but according to Wikipedia we have Denise Platt (Anne Hathaway), Greg Platt (Ewan McGregor), and their children Audrey (Maisy Stella) and Brian (Christian Convery). At the start of the film they are all depicted doing the sorts of things you might expect an Average Family in an Amblin-like, Spielbergian pastiche of an ’80s movie to be doing; Denise and Gregg are having marital difficulties and arguing with the neighbours, academic Audrey is being teased for her trouble, and Brian is cycling around with his mates getting into scrapes. All lovely and wholesome and a bit predictable.

Naturally, this all changes somewhat when, one night, the lot of them (along with the surrounding streets and houses) find themselves literally surrounded by freakin’ dinosaurs. Here, for the audience, is where the fun begins. Suddenly, all that Spielbergian whimsy is tossed aside in favour of brute survival. You might expect the kids to band together and cycle around trapping dinosaurs and solving mysteries a la Stranger Things, but the film’s having none of it. The stranded humans, quite realistically, all begin to freak out. When the dinosaur attacks come, they are swift and deadly. Those who object to some of the non-karmic deaths in The Franchise (think poor Eddie in The Lost World) will not have a good time. For the rest of us, the film makes it clear that the stakes are high, and no one is safe from being as horribly killed as can be implied within the restrictions of a 12A (in the UK) rating. And it’s marvellous.

Given that The End of Oak Street was made on a fraction of Jurassic World: Rebirth‘s budget, it’s impressive just how much more entertaining its set pieces and creature encounters are, and how much more convincingly it places the characters in actual peril. For all that the characters’ names aren’t especially memorable, they feel convincingly like regular people in mortal danger, literally battening down the hatches and going slightly crazy in the face of this far-out threat. Granted, Ewan McGregor does seem to be sleepwalking through much of his performance (and was the American accent necessary? It ain’t good), but fortunately Anne Hathaway is acting for two in this movie. The kids also put on a good show and do occasionally quite plausibly dumb things without ever being annoying.

Of course, this being LITC, you’re probably more curious about the dinosaurs than whether or not McGregor can convincingly sound like anything other than a Scot or Alec Guinness. One can’t realistically expect scientific accuracy going into this, and good thing too as the film fails to deliver it. Aside from being plucked out of disparate time periods, the animals have all been lightly monsterised in one way or another, whether it be with a little size inflation, a trip through the gnarlification machine, or both. And the theropods all have pronated forearms (REALLY!?!). On the plus side, it’s lovely to see coelophysoid-looking theropods in place of yet more eyeroll-inducing JP-style ‘raptors’, and the overenthusiasm for manky plumage does lend the creatures a freakish, otherworldly air. These dinosaurs aren’t just mammal stands-ins; there are no ‘big cows’ here. They are the other, with the herbivores displaying a nonchalant indifference to humans (and their property), while the carnivores, naturally, see them as potential snacks. I’d really like to say a bit more on specific animals included, so I’ll stick that in a spoiler section below.

While the story moves along at a decent enough pace, a really quite unexpected (and very darkly amusing and welcome) event about halfway through really kicks things into gear. It feels, for a moment, like all bets are off. Unfortunately, while the film does manage a few more moments of notable tension and gleeful sadism after that, the ending is rather anticlimactic and undoes a lot of the goodwill built up until that point. It also poses far more questions than it answers – but then isn’t that often the case when time travel shenanigans are involved? Just as the big teleportation event is largely unexplained (beyond ‘it came from space’), it might be best that certain questions go unanswered. All the same, the ending feels like a bit of a cop-out and rather like it was altered following feedback from test screenings; I wonder if we’ll find out that that was the case at some point.

Disappointing ending and a few boilerplate characters and odd choices aside, this is an enjoyable film, certainly more so than any film in The Franchise since the first Jurassic World. It’s inherently silly and unlikely to garner serious critical acclaim, and yes, the dinosaurs can often look offensively ugly from a palaeoartistic standpoint. But it builds tension well and has an absolutely glorious mean streak while the good parts last. Not a masterpiece, but a fun enough night at the cinema. In terms of a star rating, I simply have to give it more than I gave Rebirth, just because I must admit to having enjoyed it more. So, let’s say 4 out of 5 Hones (that’s right, I’m bringing this back):

Creature Talk (SPOILERS)

Much as it would obviously have been far more satisfying for us nerds if the filmmakers had stuck with a single real fauna from a single time and place (Late Jurassic North America being the obvious choice), the decision to include a mishmash of prehistoric creatures did at least result in a few surprises. Of course, we all saw the Coelophysis and Allosaurus-alikes in the trailers, but I was somewhat surprised to see (a very ugly) Spinosaurus show up, and the inclusion of a group of what appeared to be rauisuchids was a welcome treat. There were a decent variety of pterosaurs, too, even if they were all given the B-movie treatment – who expects to see a Rhamphorhynchus-alike, a pterodactyloid with Pteranodon-like features, and what appeared to be an ornitocheirid in a movie like this? It’s just a shame none of them were bigger.

We simply must talk about the sauropods, of course. Oh boy, the sauropods. Apart from featuring in one of the greatest scenes in the movie (where their behaviour is clearly modelled on tortoises), their shaggy, wooly pelts look absolutely ridiculous. I guess the idea was to do something new with them, but crossing Camarasaurus with a wookiee is stretching credulity too far, even for a movie featuring magic teleportation bubbles.

On the other hand, the film did manage to make the creatures threatening as well as absurdly shaggy. Predators stalk and charge down their prey with zero mercy; raising your palm at them is unlikely to do much. While overly gnarly, there’s something to be said for the way they all look a little beaten up, like they’ve had a tough existence, and even if it’s too large to actually be an Allosaurus, the allosaur became the real hero of the movie for me when it dispatched Ewan McGregor’s character in absolutely brutal fashion. None of these creatures are here to swoop in and save the heroes, and absolutely everyone is on the menu. Which is as it should be.

Elsewhere, we’re served up absurdities like the giant spiky terrapin…things and a gigantic snake-like monstrosity. There’s a good chance that it’s just just based on Titanoboa (which isn’t even from the Mesozoic), but to my eyes it looked far too slimy and scale-less to simply be an oversized snake; it almost resembled some horrifyingly huge caecilian. Now there’s something to give you nightmares. Whatever the case, the set piece in which it stealthily invaded the house was excellent fun.

It did feel like there were a number of missed opportunities – for example, Stegosaurus showed up (sporting an intriguing blend of an overall retro design with very prominent keratinous sheaths on the plates), only to just stroll on by. It would have been fun to see the ‘helpless herbivore’ trope be subverted, since The Franchise seems to have made all its herbivores completely placid following the first sequel. It only had a limited budget, I suppose, but then clearly someone cared enough to stick feathers (too many feathers, in fact) on the creatures and research a few more obscure animals for inclusion. If there’s a sequel, here’s hoping they listen to the nerds a little more from the start.