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Creative Dinosaur Mayhem Thrills at the End of Oak Street

In the wake of Jurassic Park and its groundbreaking dinosaur effects, one of the popular imagined ideas for its potential sequels was to take the dinosaurs off the sequestered island and put them in a more recognizable and immediate environment. Spielberg did this briefly at the end of The Lost World where a T-Rex is unleashed on San Diego, but subsequent movies for whatever reason had no interest in going there. Then finally, 2018’s Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom ended on the clear note of dinosaurs off the island and unleashed into civilization. However Jurassic World: Dominion came along next and tossed out that premise for the familiar very promptly.
I wonder if David Robert Mitchell saw that and figured he would make his own ersatz sequel to Fallen Kingdom that did in fact take advantage of the concept of dinosaurs infiltrating our everyday lives. Because that is what The End of Oak Street feels like, a movie that really is what any of those Jurassic World films should have been in terms of both its subject and suspense, but that benefits from not having any baggage connected to that franchise -much as certain elements and themes that have recurred through the Jurassic films have an unavoidable way of seeping in here.
Such as the evergreen narrative, usually backgrounded, of a married couple with kids going through a rough patch. That is the case of Denise and Greg Platt (Anne Hathaway and Ewan McGregor), a couple living with their kids Audrey (Maisy Stella) and Brian (Christian Convery) in the Michigan suburbs in 1982. She is a dissatisfied housewife and cynical realist who is writing a book in secret, he is recently out of work, making ends meet as a pizza delivery driver -likewise a secret, yet is nonetheless an optimist at heart. As they contemplate the future of their relationship and their family, a couple strange occurrences in the neighbourhood accompanied by flashing lights culminate in them waking up one morning to discover that the neighbourhood has been fully moved to a prehistoric environment and that dinosaurs are now intruding on it and attacking the locals.
The movie is full of intense action, but it comes largely on the heels of a necessarily slow burn. Mitchell like many a modern blockbuster filmmaker appears to be directly influenced by Spielberg (the film’s senior producer J.J. Abrams is also of course famously a Spielberg acolyte), but unlike several peers actually understands Spielberg’s technique with regards to suspense. Much like both Jaws and Jurassic Park, he builds a creeping sense of dread quite well, both in anticipation of the first appearance of dinosaurs and in depicting the dangers they pose that the audience can see ahead of the characters. It is actually relatively restrained in its dinosaur action, without a lot of exorbitant kills or carnage -though when they do come they come hard. The tension of the circumstance is the critical thing, coming mostly from the dinosaurs but also from the stakes of the family’s survival.
The Platts aren’t a particularly uniquely defined family, apart from the dysfunction of Denise and Greg’s deceptions towards each other, but they are relatable enough to invest in and it comes down to a few nicely illustrated details. Brian’s attachment to the family dog Starbuck, who disappears early in the movie from his outdoor doghouse -the ripped rope implying he was devoured; and yet Brian remains adamant about his survival. Dogs tend to be easy casualties in movies like this, but Mitchell subverts that by engineering a human’s bond with a dog into a subplot. The emotional weight of these characters is strengthened too by their responses to the trauma they undergo which frankly, and especially with the kids, feels a lot more guttural and realistic than in any Jurassic movie equivalent. And it is worth noting also a refreshing and cute if under-served subversion regarding the neighbour girl Jeanette (Jordan Alexa Davis), whom Brian has a crush on and who joins the family when hers is gone.
Hathaway gives a good performance in this, steely and stubborn, and with appropriate terror. Denise is a difficult character straining to emanate calm and control from long before the neighbourhood’s abduction -struggling in not only her emotional attachment to her husband but her children, as expressed vicariously through her unfinished novel in which a matriarch abandons her family. Her conflict and compulsions shine through in Hathaway’s dedication as she struggles to be the leader and protector she is required to become. McGregor meanwhile plays Greg as very consciously emasculated. His job, his fashion, and how he relates to the kids are already there, but he also adds a Midwestern accent reminiscent of his role in Fargo that is not entirely convincing. But he does convey a tremendous sense of being out of his depth among dinosaurs and not by any means a traditional heroic figure. Denise and Greg’s relationship has these undercurrents of hostility throughout, that are gradually diminished and replaced with their old affections as the story goes along and their affections rekindle through survival. But there is a comment to be made there about nuclear family dynamics especially as they relate to the context of the 1980s.
That context also makes a lot of sense for this movie given the filmmaking influences that do stretch a little beyond the vicinity of Spielberg. The most notable recurring technical choices are the split dioptre shots -where foreground and background are unnervingly presented in equal focus. Mitchell composes them in such a way to really draw attention to them, such as a framing of Denise talking to a neighbour in profile that leaves most of the frame concerned with the kids playing outside. A later critical sequence of the family figuring out their situation and what to do next rotates cuts on every new line of dialogue between various pairings composed in this way -one bizarrely close in the foreground with another reacting in the back. It is an eerie choice, but not one that serves much of a purpose here -it is notable that the technique is never applied when the dinosaurs are about, which is where it might have derived the most suspense.
There is an explanation for the plot involving wormhole science but it is all extremely ludicrous and the film makes no qualms about the deficiencies of its internal logic. It expects you to go along with the absurdity as far even as the means eventually found to get home, and generally you can. A movie about dinosaurs in suburbia can rightly scoff at anyone demanding scientific authenticity. But the way it does use its plot device in the ending especially is altogether highly convenient and easy. There is a sense of narrative cheapness that doesn’t sit right and a whole host of troubling implications that Mitchell may or may not be aware of.
But stranger things have happened in the Jurassic movies of late and at least this dinosaur flick had something genuinely new to offer. The End of Oak Street is an outlandish conceit to get to a specific context, but it takes advantage of that context very well. Cars, alleys, rooftops, backyard pools, all adapted for interaction with dinosaurs and most of the time it lives up to that fun. Add in some characters with dimension and conflict and a palatable sense of fear and intensity, and the movie works pretty well for itself. The Jurassic sequel we deserved.

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