Film Review: The End of Oak Street

 

Sexuality/Nudity Mature

Violence Mature

Vulgarity Acceptable

Anti-Catholic Philosophy Mature

This movie has all the elements that should make it a fun, summer blockbuster.  But in this case the movie is less than the sum of its parts.

The End of Oak Street takes place in a suburban community in 1982.  It centers around the Platt family.  Denise (Anne Hathaway) is an aspiring novelist who is ready to leave her husband and children at the drop of a hat.  Greg (Ewan McGregor), is an amiable guy who is delivering pizzas to make ends meet.  The teenage daughter Audrey (Maisy Stella) is incredibly smart with big dreams of college.  And finally Brian (Christian Convery) is a typical, not-that-bright junior-high kid who has a crush on the new transfer student Jeannette (Jordan Alexa Davis).  The cracks in the family are subtle at first but then become more pronounced under stress.  And this stress occurs when the entire neighborhood gets mysteriously transported several hundred million years into the past where they must not survive surrounded by prehistoric life.

I will say that the movie does pack within it some genuine thrills.  Oak Street makes the dinosaurs genuinely scary and a real threat.  The Jurassic series tends to make them more and more cartoonish, but this movie uses them as monsters who inflict gruesome deaths on the residents of Oak Street.  The design on the dinosaurs is also much different than what we've seen in the past, comporting to what modern paleontologists think they looked like, feathers and all.  Some of the action sequences move with real energy and thrills, with very decent camera work besides.  Speaking of the camera work, writer/director David Robert Mitchell seems very enamored of use deep focus shots so that it becomes part of this movie's signature style.  The special effects are as good as anything else out there right now.  The early scenes where the family begins to realize their threat have some moments of fun, escapist entertainment.  The performances are all decent from the main cast, where none of them break the spell.

But even with all of these pieces parts in place, the movie never becomes more than these disparate elements.  It apes the feel of 1980's movies, particularly that of Spielberg, but it cannot create the same sense of wonder awe.  Go back and watch something that is supposed to be a straightforward monster movie like Jaws and Spielberg fills you with that wonder and awe even as they are looking over Ben Gardner's broken boat.  Oak Street has a lot of spectacle, but it never feels weighty enough to dig deep into your heart.

But the real place the movie fails is the writing.  This is a shame because with just a little tweaking of the script, the movie could go from mediocre to very good.  The main problem is that the movie places Denise at the center of the movie as its main hero and she is incredibly unlikeable.  We are meant to sympathize with her domestic dissatisfaction where she already has a bag packed to leave, but can't bring herself to do it when she looks at her children.  The movie never gives you a rational reason for her to be this upset.  Before the movie begins, Greg lost his job and began delivering pizzas to make ends meet.  In one scene he parks in the driveway and begins to take the pizza delivery sign off of his car.  When his son asks why he does it since he needs to put it back on again in the morning, Greg says, "It embarrasses your mother."  Denise gives no support or sympathy to her husband who is clearly scrapping to provide even though he feels like a failure.  They don't give her enough of a reason to resent him.  At one point we see him secretly take a drink from a hidden bottle, which might hint at an alcohol issue.  But even though this would ground her resentment of him, the movie dismisses it completely.  

Greg is a decent guy, but he is fairly ineffectual.  He is kind even to his annoying neighbors, even when Denise is strident.  He tries to be optimistic for the kids while Denise thinks pessimism is the best way to prepare their children for potential disaster.  The movie wants you to side with Denise on this, but she really offers no better alternatives.  

The children also make incredibly stupid decisions.  Audrey sneaks into the garage and turns on the car so she can listen to "Valerie" by Steve Winwood (this is the first hint that she has same-sex attractions).  Not only is she playing music that could attract dinosaurs, she is doing it with the car's headlights turned on, wasting precious battery power.  I kept shouting in my head, "TURN OFF THE HEADLIGHTS!"  Brian is also very foolish.  One night he sees his dog outside runs out with his bow and arrow and tries to catch him.  Aubrey sees him and instead of getting her parents, she also runs after him.  Everything bad that happens to this family in the rest of the movie is because of that boy's stupidity.

Speaking his bow and arrow, we see him walking the neighborhood with it at the beginning of the film.  We think we are getting a set-up/payoff here, but there is none.  When he sees his crush, he goes to shoot the dinosaur attacking her, but fails miserably.  Instead Aubrey saves her with her knife skills, thus starting an attraction between them both.  So I guess the point was to subvert expectations, but this trope got old back in 2017.

There are also moments that are so contrived that they make no sense.  In one scene, a gigantic snake comes in through a second-story window and slowly makes his way downstairs and sneaks up on Denise.  In doing so, the snake passes up three potential victims.  There is no reason for this to be done except to create artificial tension.  Besides this, the scene provides nothing to the plot.  It could be completely removed from the film and it would make no difference to the story in any way.

And while the movie highlights the marital problems, it does show how marriage can be a blessing in times of crisis.  There is one touching scene where Denise and Greg are huddled-down in danger and you can see their bond grow closer because they need each other.  There is also an incredibly odd and off-putting scene where the two share a laugh while watching two giant dinosaurs mate along the side of a house.  I suppose that is something positive to take in terms of the value of marriage, but it seems buried underneath everything else.

The real problem with the writing, though, is the ending.  I will not spoil it here, though I may have to write an entirely separate post about it.  But the characters make a decision that, on the surface, seems to hit all of the correct emotional notes.  But the moment you start to think about it with any real application of morality, the implications get more and more morally confused to the point where you wonder whether the decision may actually have been evil.  Because it deals with time travel, there is a lot of intentional ambiguity, but instead of giving you the proper catharsis, it instead leaves a bad taste in your mouth.

What is so frustrating about The End of Oak Street is that it has all of the ingredients of an incredibly fun sci-fi family film.  But it fell apart at the writing stage, which is the stage where most of the flaws are most easily fixed.  Instead, we got this creative-concept film hampered by unlikeable and unintelligent characters.  Perhaps if we could go back in time, we could fix those problems and therefore we would hope that this wouldn't be the end of Oak Street.