“Is that a fucking dinosaur?!”
There’s a moment in David Robert Mitchell’s The End of Oak Street that unlocked a very specific core memory. That of me, as a young boy, shaking intensely from a cocktail of adrenaline, excitement and fear as I watch the big fella from Seinfeld getting feasted upon by a Dilophasaurus in Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park. My mother had to yank me out of the cinema, splash some cold water on my face to break the hyperventalating and run back into the cinema lest we miss more of the carnage and wonder. It’s genuinely one of my favourite memories I have of ever going to a cinema even though my skeleton was set to jump out of my skin in the moment. And as I watched the latest high concept sci-fi adventure by the madman behind It Follows, I could feel that very sensation crawling underneath my skin once more as I found myself guffawing, clapping and just all round enjoying the utter chaos and the fantastical coursing through this film.
It’s easy to say that The End of Oak Street takes its cues from Spielberg’s Amblin films. Produced by uber Spielberg fan, J.J. Abrams, it covers the gamut of what you’d expect – parents on the edge of divorce? Check. Secondary coming of age story happening in the background of the main narrative? Check. A level of violence that would make you question your parenting skills after bringing your child to the film? Check and check. But The End of Oak Street is an overall throwback of cinema. People of a certain generation remember it fondly. It was a time when kids would stay out all day, drink from the garden hose and get into hearty misadventures. They seem to misremember that lead was in everything, there was a deep cultural panic around child abduction, and the society was only just coming to terms with idea that maybe asbestos shouldn’t be used in literally all building materials. It was also time when PG-13 films were gnarly. That you can thank Spielberg for. Thanks to the kitchen appliance fuckery of Gremlins and the heart ripping nastiness of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Spielberg had lobbied the MPAA for an intermediary rating that didn’t completely kneecap the box office of those films. And so the PG-13 rating was born in the States, and so too was the cinematic diet of many a tween and teen swiftly expanded.
I say all this because Mitchell’s film evokes a very specific tone belonging to that era in a way that feels authentic. The End Of Oak Street is a high concept film that puts emotion at the core of its story, swapping out convoluted plot devices for an almost laughably simplistic yet effective “because dinosaurs, that’s why” approach. This is a film you take your kid to and then kick yourself later that night when they’re running in to your bedroom after having nightmares about being trampled by a stegosaurus.Â
The Platt family, lead by Denise (Anne Hathaway) and Greg (Ewan McGregor) are your typical ’82 American suburbanites. That is until they wake up one morning to find that their neighbourhood may have shifted, not only in space, but time as well. Where once they would have wholesome block parties with their neighbours, it’s now been replaced with a rampaging T-Rex and other creatures who very much do not belong in Reagan’s America. There’s no rhyme or reason to it, it is what it is and the family has to do whatever they can to survive and get back home.Â
The End of Oak Street is a surprising popcorn crowd pleaser. Any and all subsequent sequels to Jurassic Park may have fallen on their faces, but Mitchell may have accidentally crafted the perfect follow up, focusing more on the beating heart of family rather than the what, why and how of it all. The simplicity of the narrative works in favour of the film. You don’t have time to worry about the mechanics of why everything’s happening, just that you desperately want these people to make it back home safely. Once the prehistoric bedlam kicks into high gear, it seldom lets up, if only for brief moments of breath catching that may or may not be interrupted by gigantic, home invading snakes.Â
The End Of Oak Street is a crowd pleaser and cinema cheerer, a nice little reminder of what a family film used to be – for better or worse. In a time when it’s hard to impress the masses, David Robert Mitchell has done the near impossible and given movie dinosaurs their teeth back and their ability to frighten once more.
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