'The End of Oak Street' Is the Best Dinosaur Movie in Ages

Don’t be fooled by the ambiguous and pedestrian Jurassic-less title — The End of Oak Street is a dinosaur movie for the ages. Neither the title nor the trailers give much away, and it’s for the best because the less you know about The End of Oak Street, the more fun it is. In fact, you should probably stop reading right now and go buy tickets to what just might be the most exhilarating roller coaster movie of the year. But while you’re still here, let’s talk a little bit about how a movie featuring a suburban family of four with Anne Hathaway and Ewan McGregor manages to make dinosaurs scarier and more exciting than any of the past Jurassic Park or World movies have since the original.

While last year’s Jurassic World: Rebirth proved that audiences still love dinosaur movies, it also showed that the franchise had run out of ideas. The End of Oak Street exposes Jurassic World’s creative bankruptcy, particularly how Rebirth was merely a retread of everything that’d worked in the past and a disappointing regression to unoriginal storytelling. Writer and director David Robert Mitchell, the man behind 2014’s chilling It Follows, delivers a fresh and unexpected, completely bonkers story that meshes retro suburbia with uncharted prehistory, reinvigorating the entire dinosaur survival genre. Denise and Greg Platt (Hathaway and McGregor), along with their teenage kids Audrey (Maisy Stella) and Brian (Christian Convery from Netflix’s Sweet Tooth), live in the desaturated idyll of 1982 before strange events throw them into a chaotic scramble for their lives against ancient, scientifically updated megafauna, and it’s one hell of a theatrical ride.

Jurassic Park came out in 1993 and popularized lizard-like dinosaurs as science understood them at the time. Paleontologists have learned a whole lot more since then, and we now know that most dinosaurs, such as Jurassic Park’s iconic Velociraptors (that actually lived during the Cretaceous era, not the Jurassic), are closer to birds than lizards. The End of Oak Street benefits from the updated science and features hairy or feathered monsters alongside scaled behemoths, like Utahraptors reminiscent of roided-up ostriches having a really bad day. The End of Oak Street might have the strictly fictional science behind its plot explained with some hand-waving scientific gobbledegook, but it does go to some length to depict scientifically accurate dinosaurs, including some bodily processes never before seen on the big screen. It’s rated PG because younger kids might need a little hand-holding on top of the scares and gruesome moments.

Mitchell is an artful director who keeps everything hidden until the very last moment, putting a slight twist on the golden rule of ‘show, don’t tell’. In this case, Mitchell shows as absolutely little as possible, heightening the tension and excitement of every encounter. The End of Oak Street is crammed to the gills with terrifying moments punctuated with humor, as well as relationship dynamics and challenges that many families should find relatable. It’s easy to draw parallels between Denise’s feeling of being trapped in a life she wants to escape and the situation of being whisked into another time and trying to find a way home; or Greg’s stoic need to deal with problems without involving or worrying his wife and kids against the futility of having to deal with real-life monsters on his own. The End of Oak Street is a family adventure through and through, and just like every proper story uses the fantastical plot and its perils to bring everyone closer together. After all, nothing bonds a family more than time-displacing wormholes, hungry Spinosauruses, and loyal blue heelers that go missing during a dinosaur epidemic.

Apart from an updated depiction of prehistory, The End of Oak Street makes no attempt to be grounded in any sort of real science. In fact, the end of the film probably raises more questions than it answers, but that’s also the beauty of it. The story is so crazy, so unexpected, that the door is left open for more tales in the same vein. Setting the story in the '80s imbues it with a sort of nostalgic power that evokes classic adventures like The Goonies or E.T., or the campy horror of The Lost Boys and Fright Night. It’s a love story to that era, everything from short shorts to polaroids to biking around with one’s friends. It’s an homage to Carl Sagan, who said, “we are like butterflies who flutter for a day and think it’s forever,” which is at once YOLO and a humbling admission of our insignificance in the Earth’s roughly 4.54 billion-year existence. It’s a deeply personal story crafted from Mitchell’s obsession with dinosaurs that he shared with his late father, which explains how The End of Oak Street has so much heart beyond the thrills, chills, and kills. 

There’s a lot more to dinosaurs than Jurassic Park, and the long-running franchise can learn a thing or two from The End of Oak Street’s courage to tell an original story. It’s the sort of film that deserves to be rewarded with a family trip to the cinema. In a way, the ambiguous title helps keep the wormhole open for more stories, and J.J. Abrams’ Bad Robot can take the story in almost any direction, whether it’s with even more dinosaurs or something else entirely. There really isn’t much one can say about The End of Oak Street without spoiling its best moments, just that it’s a cinematic thrill and a fresh new story that reinvents dinosaurs for today’s audiences.

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