Summer is almost over, but we are lucky enough to have one more blockbuster to cap it off. David Robert Mitchell’s The End of Oak Street is a pure treat. Vintage Amblin in all the right ways (here’s looking at you, Stranger Things...), The End of Oak Street feels like a rhoto-Jurassic Park.
The film takes its time setting things up, making the 100-minute runtime drag just a bit too much as a few of those setups don’t quite pay off (the bully, for one). But once it starts moving, this flick really starts moving.
Set in the 1980s in an idyllic Michigan suburb, the Platt family is the perfect representation of the setting they inhabit. We have Greg (Ewan McGregor) and Denise (Anne Hathaway) with their two children, Audrey (Maisy Stella) and Ben (Christian Convery), whom we find in various stages of discontent. Ben is rebellious and getting into fights, seemingly as a result of his parents fighting, while Audrey is a girl with dreams of college that remain just out of reach.
Greg and Denise are keeping secrets from one another. Denise has been secretly writing a book that appears to be more of a fantasy about escaping this suburban fairy tale, while Greg is hiding the loss of his breadwinning status, picking up pizza delivery jobs in an effort to stem the bleeding from his job loss.
The film is an overt critique of this façade of nostalgia and the desire to go back to a simpler time. I wish this critique had a little more chomp, though—especially when it comes to the ending, which feels a bit too happy, even if there are some disturbing ramifications.
What the film really gets right is the dinosaurs. Great designs effectively convey the danger and scale of our various prehistoric beasts. The film’s logic does crumble a little bit when it needs to split up our family for the sake of drama, but I’ll forgive it considering how real the threats feel. The buildup works, and my jaw dropped in the third act (multiple times) for reasons I won’t spoil.
Well worth seeing on the big screen. The End of Oak Street feels like a breath of fresh air, even when it has less of an identity of its own and is more a very strong imitation of past auteurs.