The End of Oak Street review: Imagine Jurassic Park but bleak and stupid
What if Steven Spielberg were a misanthrope? On its surface, The End of Oak Street plays like a pastiche of Spielberg work, cherry-picking elements from Jaws and Jurassic Park, including signature moments of sound design and score. Yet the question at its core is not really about whether its American nuclear family will survive. (It’s a Hollywood summer movie, after all.) It’s what happens when the Amblin aesthetic is used as a husk to express a deep disdain for humankind.
Warner Bros. gave writer-director David Robert Mitchell (It Follows) a blockbuster budget that enabled top-notch visual effects and A-list stars like Anne Hathaway and Ewan McGregor. And in return, he gave the studio a survival action movie bursting with ferocious feathered dinosaurs, but also oozing with existential dread and a slyly regressive politics.
On its surface, The End of Oak Street looks like summer fun. But it is, in fact, as bleak and infuriating as the recent — and alarmingly similar — Netflix release The Last House.
The End of Oak Street is a gory and mean sci-fi adventure.
Credit: Warner Bros. Pictures
Mitchell begins in a setting so Spielbergian it might be considered copyright infringement: 1982, a sunny summer block party in a beautiful suburb, filled with vibrant green lawns and smiling families engaged in simple games like sack races and balloon tosses. It’s idyllic. But soon, Mitchell mars this peaceful tableau with marital discord.
Strained Denise Platt (Hathaway) and her oafish husband, Greg (McGregor), bicker in front of their children, teen Audry (Daisy Stella) and adolescent Brian (Christian Convery). The children whisper nervously about whether divorce could be on the horizon. They don’t even know that Denise is writing a “fictional” novel about a fed-up housewife who flees her husband and children for a fresh start in New York. But before Denise can go full Kramer Vs. Kramer, some strange anomalies transport their neighborhood back to a time when dinosaurs roamed the Earth.
Their quiet streets no longer lead to cities or even other suburbs, but to murky swamps, tropical forests, and a sharp cliff edge. Dinosaurs prowl the lawns or swoop down from the skies, ruthlessly turning people into prey. Mitchell indulges in his horror roots here, relishing the chance to turn minor characters into bags of blood, ready to burst over porches or across rooftops.
It’s a ghoulish spectacle that evokes Jaws more than Jurassic Park, but with the vicious edge of Colin Trevorrow’s ugly Jurassic World. You might recall in that, in the reboot, a young woman, who dared to plan a wedding, was served up to satisfy the audience’s bloodlust. Yet there’s a more crucial difference between Mitchell’s version of an Amblin movie and Spielberg’s than this slasher-level graphic violence.
Credit: Warner Bros. Pictures
While Spielberg used his amazing stories to celebrate mankind’s resilience and the power of community — even in his summer release Disclosure Day — Mitchell’s story is harrowing in its portrait of survival of the selfish. His heroes will not come together as unlikely allies with neighbors and strangers. Mostly, when the Platts see another human being attacked, they take the opportunity to run the other way with a consistently astounding lack of situational awareness.
Realizing the seriousness of their predicament, Greg and Denise discuss whether or not to reach out to other survivors. Greg is against the idea, preferring to stay home and keep their resources to themselves. Denise argues that they must go out — not so much to find allies or help others, but to hoard resources like food and water before the “others” get to them.
Credit: Warner Bros. Pictures
It’s a grim vision of the American family, only made more uncomfortable by their son. See, all we know about Brian before the time-travel incident is that he’s broken a neighbor boy’s arm for no apparent reason. That it was an accident matters little, as he shrugs off the consequences of his actions. Instead, he sputters with impotent rage, desperate to exert his violent tendencies but too scared to do so in a remotely useful manner. In a Stephen King movie, he’d be an antagonist in the vein of IT’s Henry Bowers.
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Basically, every time his family is confronted by a deadly dino, Brian fumbles with his bow-and-arrow set while someone else — often his mother or sister — rushes into the fray to save the day. Even when offered the chance to rescue his crush, Jeannette (Jordan Alexa Davis), he fails and watches in agony as his sister sweeps in as the hero he is not.
This might be the most inventive element of The End of Oak Street, subverting the expectations that the chance to be a hero will straighten the kid out. But it’s also another sign of how Mitchell’s filmic philosophies veer far bleaker than Spielberg’s.
The End of Oak Street is awful, despite Anne Hathaway’s efforts.
Credit: Daniel McFadden
Mitchell, who also created the polarizing but compelling Under the Silver Lake, fails to world build a convincing world here. His suburbia is peopled with archetypes of the frustrated housewife, the doofy dad, the shy teen girl, the mean neighbor, and the kindly neighbor, but with little specificity or logic. Characters don’t have personalities so much as functions. So, when Denise goes to the library to research a strange plant that’s popped up in her neighbor’s yard, of course the librarian (Emily Kuroda) recognizes it on the spot as vegetation from millions of years ago.
The audience at the advanced screening I attended laughed at such inexplicable moments, as they did when McGregor — constrained by atrociously awkward dialogue — bellows in an American accent about dinosaurs and deceptions.
Hathaway manages to rise above the worst of Mitchell’s dialogue, seemingly treating it as part of the pleasant facade she strives to maintain for others. But McGregor is swallowed up by the astonishingly oblivious dad he’s tasked to play. When it comes to running from dinosaurs in abject terror, however, both are very convincing. But again — these are not Jurassic Park dinosaurs. These creatures are uglier, meaner, and act like Michael Meyers, creeping through the backgrounds of suburbia as a silent threat (no matter how massive) to the average Americans who remain oblivious to their violent potential. They are scary, but in a world where the characters feel paper-thin, the thrill is like a rollercoaster ride, with wheels greased by apathy.
Credit: Warner Bros. Pictures
These crude sketches of an American family might be intended as a critique, showing how tribalism in the U.S. has risen to such a fevered pitch that a family will look only to its own survival when things get rough. (Or hey, maybe you take in a stray kid if one of your kids has a crush on her.) But I suspect this reading gives Mitchell too much credit, as the climax seeks to undo much of the callousness the Platt family exhibits, without asking them to risk anything.
Put simply and without spoilers, the ending of The End of Oak Street feels like a studio note that Mitchell carried out under protest. Think The Bad Seed or 1956’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers, in which the happy ending feels like an apology to the audience for so much horror instead of a satisfying conclusion. Mitchell’s final act feels not only feels unearned, but also seems to smirk at the audience, suggesting that they should know better.
And if I’m wrong, and Mitchell did choose that ending, then what does The End of Oak Street even mean? What meaning can be pulled from a movie where archetypes of the nuclear family fight only for their own interests, and still get a fairly happy ending? I wasn’t sure what to make of it in The Last House and I’m not sure what to make of The End of Oak Street.
But if you’re looking for carefree summer fun, look elsewhere. The End of Oak Street is not fun. It’s bleak, brutal, and ultimately infuriating.
The End of Oak Street opens in theaters on Aug. 14.
