The End of Oak Street: Best Dinosaur Movie Since ‘Jurassic Park’

Do you know how long it’s been since we have had a good dinosaur movie? It’s been exactly 33 years, two months, and, at the time of writing, three days. That’s how much time has passed since Steven Spielberg’s adaptation of Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park hit theaters, and it’s all been downhill from there. I’ll stand on Spielberg’s The Lost World: Jurassic Park and Joe Johnston’s Jurassic Park III as palatable blockbusters, whereas the new Jurassic World quadrilogy is nothing but billion-dollar dead air. The deficit of dinosaur cinema left a gaping hole in my heart, making writer-director David Robert Mitchell’s new dino-thriller, The End of Oak Street, all the more welcome. A throwback on all fronts, it absolutely slaps.

Before getting into The End of Oak Street, one needs to consider the canon of dino-cinema. Obvious progenitors like Harry O. Hoyt’s The Lost World and the original King Kong were some of the first films to bring our beloved terrible lizards to life through the power of stop-motion, resurrecting the extinct through the cutting edge of film form. The same goes for Jurassic Park’s blend of puppetry and CGI in the ‘90s, though there isn’t much prehistoric meat between that and Hoyt’s The Lost World. Apart from the odd animated film or Jurassic sequel, the dinosaur film is practically extinct. The End of Oak Street won’t revive the subgenre, but it is easily the best dinosaur flick since 1993.

Considering that J.J. Abrams produced The End of Oak Street, early theories speculated that the film was a secretive Cloverfield sequel. Abrams is a connoisseur of the “mystery box,” making Mitchell’s straightforwardness all the funnier. Bar the purposeful obtuseness of Under the Silver Lake’s neo-noir pastiche, he is a relatively cut-and-dried auteur. It Follows is about an STD (Sexually Transmitted Demon), whereas The End of Oak Street is about a 1980s Michigan suburb teleporting to prehistoric times. Focalizing one family—the Platts—led by a fierce Anne Hathaway and a burnt-out Ewan McGregor, Mitchell’s latest is a straight-up survival thriller. Coasting at a breezy 100 minutes flat, the film is the ideal summer blockbuster.

Marking Mitchell’s fourth foray into feature filmmaking, The End of Oak Street might be the Michigan-native’s best outing to date. Being quite partial to Under the Silver Lake’s obfuscatory nature and the suffocating dread of It Follows, these quirks are present once again here. Mitchell offers little explanation for why the neighborhood of Flowervale randomly teleports to the age of reptiles, instead jam-packing the film with danger lurking in every corner. The reverent nostalgia is starkly reminiscent of his debut, The Myth of the American Sleepover, and his controlled sense of atmosphere remains intact. It’s been a long time since Under the Silver Lake’s unceremonious April 2019 release, but the eight-year wait was certainly worth it.

When it comes to modern dinosaur movies, pickings have been slim. Aside from Jurassic World sequels Dominion and Rebirth, the only other mainstream dinosaur options are last year’s Primitive War (a shameless Kong: Skull Island copycat) and the Adam Driver-led 65, which was a total slog. It shouldn’t be so hard to make a good dinosaur film, but alas. Thankfully, Mitchell knows better. He knowingly cakes on the genericism in The End of Oak Street’s first act, setting up the classic ‘80s idyll before letting bloodthirsty dinosaurs wreak absolute havoc. It’s the “dinosaurs in the world of man” concept that Jurassic World: Dominion squandered so horribly, providing Mitchell ample space to frolic around his suburban sandbox.

Most of us are here for dinosaurs, so let’s get down to brass tacks. Firstly, the carefree use of feathers on the dinos—a learned revelation since 1993—fills me with absolute glee. After the T. rex’s reign over dinosaur cinema, it is nice to see the Allosaurus take the mantle from Jurassic Park’s literal icon. In place of Jurassic Park’s velociraptors are Coelophysis, and the Spinosaurus returns for a sequence that trumps its inclusion in Jurassic World: Rebirth. Mitchell riffs on Jurassic Park’s famous Brachiosaurus scene with his trademark tongue-in-cheek humor, while the Titanoboa makes Anaconda’s eponymous adversary look tiny in comparison. If you’re looking for frightening, electrifying dinosaur action, The End of Oak Street has you covered.

Cool dinosaurs are one thing; it’s the humans that are the tricky part. Almost every criticism of most creature films—not just dinosaurs—can be boiled down to “the [insert creature here] was cool, but the humans sucked,” which can’t be said for The End of Oak Street. If it weren’t for Mitchell’s expertise behind both camera and pen, I would dub the emotional core the highlight of The End of Oak Street. It’s easily Mitchell’s most sentimental work thus far (the film’s dedication to his father proves it), balancing concept and characters with a Shyamalan-esque quality. Hathaway and McGregor bounce effortlessly off child actors Maisy Stella and Christian Convery, conjuring a believable, emotionally engaging family structure.

Practically every blockbuster since Jaws is semi-beholden to Steven Spielberg, and The End of Oak Street is chock-full of that Spielbergian DNA. Furthermore, it’s wholly indebted to the entire Amblin arsenal; the film’s medley of Joe Dante, Richard Donner, and Tobe Hooper’s Poltergeist harkens to another bygone era besides the Mesozoic—one of adventurous, ambitious, crowd-pleasing cinema. Michael Giacchino’s intriguing, whimsical score (the skeleton key to Mitchell’s pastiche) has the flair of John Williams in his prime, with Mike Gioulakis’ multi-compositional camerawork emulating that of Spielberg cinematographer Janusz Kaminski. Minus the dinosaurs, there’s an anachronistic quality to The End of Oak Street’s overall vibe, as if Mitchell wrote the script in the 80s and fermented it in a hermetically sealed jar.

After an arduous three decades of heaping mounds of Triceratops s***, Mitchell has graced the masses with the dinosaur blockbuster we’ve clamored for. It thrillingly pushes the PG-13 rating like Spielberg is known for, offering quite a surprising amount of shock and awe for a blockbuster of this caliber. Maybe part of my elation is the feeling of relief, but there were stretches of The End of Oak Street where I either levitated from euphoria or chewed my nails from terror. As someone who loved Jurassic Park so much as a kid to the point of wanting to become a paleontologist, consider me both impressed and swept away.

still courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures

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Luca Mehta