The Platt family bands together to navigate their new surroundings after a cosmic event transports their suburban neighborhood to someplace unknown.
‘The End of Oak Street’ is the latest film from David Robert Mitchell, and it begins with a simple high-concept premise: a suburban family wake up one morning to discover that their entire neighbourhood has somehow been transported millions of years into the past, leaving them stranded in the age of the dinosaurs. What follows blends family drama, apocalyptic science fiction and dinosaur horror, as the residents of Oak Street try to understand what has happened while working out how they are going to survive.
At the centre of the story is a family who already have plenty of problems before their street takes its unexpected journey through time, and the film spends a surprising amount of time exploring those relationships alongside the more obvious threat of being eaten by dinosaurs. That kind of material can easily become groanworthy in a film like this, but it largely worked for me, and as the situation became increasingly dangerous I found myself genuinely invested in their fate.
Mitchell clearly owes a debt to the kind of films Steven Spielberg was directing or producing during the 1980s, where extraordinary events were often viewed through the experiences of an ordinary suburban family. Those influences are obvious, but the film uses them well rather than simply relying on nostalgia, combining some striking apocalyptic imagery with effective dinosaur sequences. Perhaps most importantly, it’s considerably more exciting than any of the recent ‘Jurassic Park’ films, which is more a critique of them than in praise of this.
There are plenty of plot holes if you stop to think too hard about how everything works, and the characters occasionally make decisions that seem designed primarily to get them into the next dangerous situation. Thankfully, the film moves quickly enough that neither issue becomes too distracting. What matters more is that the family drama and genre elements complement each other well, giving the dinosaur horror a bit more weight than you might expect. ‘The End of Oak Street’ is an entertaining, well made genre film that knows exactly what kind of story it wants to tell, and for the most part, tells it very well.
Rating: 4/5
Directed By: David Robert Mitchell
Starring: Anne Hathaway, Ewan McGregor, Maisy Stella, Christian Convery, Jordan Alexa Davis, P. J. Byrne, Emily Kuroda and Anne Gee Byrd
