That\u2019s a compliment, as this conspicuous 1980s throwback about a suburban neighborhood overrun by rampaging dinosaurs is a true blockbuster rush<\/p>\n
Ewan McGregor, Christian Convery, Maisy Stella, and Anne Hathaway in \u201cThe End of Oak Street\u201d<\/p>\n
The monsters are due on Maple Street, a wise gent once posited. No offense to our man Rod Serling, but he may have been off by a few blocks.<\/p>\n
The legendary TV-show creator and hall-of-fame doomsayer would have undoubtedly dug\u00a0The End of Oak Street,\u00a0writer-director David Robert Mitchell\u2019s contribution to the creatures-run-amok genre \u2014 it operates on a distinctly\u00a0Twilight Zone-type of logic. Serling isn\u2019t the primary influence hovering over this metaphor-friendly tale of the painfully ordinary disrupted by \u201cHoly shit!\u201d levels of extraordinary, however. It exists within a more modern shadow than Cold War paranoia and Eisenhower-era conformity, paying tribute to a different type of pop-culture giant. Mitchell isn\u2019t trying to nudge viewers into another dimension, not only of sight and sound but of mind. He\u2019s aiming for resurrecting the glory days of 1980s summer blockbusters, a close encounter of the vintage Amblin Entertainment kind. It\u2019s easily the best homage-slash-rip-off of a Spielberg movie in ages.<\/p>\n
Welcome to Oak Street, located squarely in Everysuburb USA, circa 1982. The annual summer block party, complete with sack races and grilled hot dogs, is in full swing. Among the participants are the Pratts, a picture-perfect American family provided you don\u2019t notice the fraying edges on the periphery. Greg (Ewan McGregor) has to excuse himself from the festivities early to deliver a pizza; he\u2019s been taking on side hustles to help make ends meet, especially because his brainy, snarky daughter Audrey (Maisy Stella) has her eye on going to Cornell. Not even regular nips from a hidden bottle of whiskey in the garage can ease Greg\u2019s self-loathing. His son, Brian (Christian Convery), is officially entering his early-teen rebellion phase. He has one eye on the new girl in town named Jeanette (Jordan Alexa Davis) and his other on constant lookout for the town bruiser, who\u2019s issued an all-points beatdown bulletin on Brian after some shenanigans involving the guy\u2019s brother.<\/p>\n
And then there is Denise Platt (Anne Hathaway, adding to what\u2019s already been a banner year). She\u2019s losing her patience with her passive-to-a-fault husband who, in her words, has a tendency to pretend problems simply don\u2019t exist. Denise has written a novel in secret, about a frustrated housewife itching to leave her husband and kids for a rich, fulfilling life in New York. It\u2019s fiction, she insists, fooling nobody but herself. This would-be bestselling author has shared her manuscript with a retired book editor down the block. She thinks Denise has a shot at getting it published. Meanwhile, the high-strung guy next door is haranguing her about their dog, and threatens to kill the pooch if it keeps pooping on his lawn. She can\u2019t even summon the energy to be polite anymore. You\u2019d say she was a woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown, minus the \u201cverge\u201d part.<\/p>\n
The Pratts are in serious crisis, besieged by bullies and bad neighbors outside of their house and foundation-crumbling dysfunction inside it. So when odd occurrences like, say, the mysterious appearance of a plant that\u2019s technically been extinct for 200 million years, or a massive, one-ton pile of dung showing up in the neighbor\u2019s backyard \u2014 something chalked up to either a karmic prank or the dog seriously needing to change up his diet \u2014 no one really has the bandwidth to pay much attention. Then there\u2019s a seismic rumble and a flash of blinding light in the middle of the night. Soon, the Pratts and their fellow Oak Street residents find themselves dealing with a plague of dinosaurs turning cul-de-sacs into killing grounds. Who has time to deal with the elephant in the room when you have to reckon with a T. rex snapping its blood-stained jaws at your front door?<\/p>\n
This is the Jurassic lark that the movie uses to test its suburbanites, one in which the why of it all (there are a few cursory mentions of wormholes and Carl Sagan is name-dropped) is way less important than the way this family bonds over a major, inexplicable catastrophe. Your entire neighborhood has been unceremoniously transported back to a nightmare Flintstones scenario \u2014 time to circle around your loved ones and hone those long-dormant survivalist skills, folks! It turns out that maybe Dad can be good in a pinch, and Mom\u2019s knack for compartmentalization sure comes in handy when trapped in a house filled with prehistoric alligators.<\/p>\n
It should surprise no one that, like her character, Hathaway is the linchpin of\u00a0The End of Oak Street,\u00a0pirouetting from exasperation to affection to hysteria to steeliness in a way that would inspire a fist-bump from\u00a0The Odyssey\u2019s Penelope. Few contemporary A-list actors give better scared face than her, and as with her psychologically fraught pop star in\u00a0Mother Mary,\u00a0there\u2019s a physicality to her action-mom turn here that\u2019s thrilling to watch. Hathaway is in a serious groove right now, and we\u2019re lucky to have her gracing so many screens over the past six months \u2014 though not as lucky as Mitchell is to have her anchoring his own personal experiment in time traveling.<\/p>\n
Because the filmmaker is less interested in the prehistoric age of rampaging predators than the golden age of multiplex moviegoing, when blockbusters felt compelled to lace their spectacles with humanity and understood the delayed-gratification thrill of tension and release. Everything from the conspicuously faded visual palette \u2014 all the better to conjure up that spirit-of-\u201982 feeling, my dear \u2014 to the\u00a0Jaws-to-Jurassic Park\u00a0method of withholding the monsters as long as possible reeks of a bygone era of Spielbergmania. Though to be fair, even His Steveness wouldn\u2019t be so cheeky as to have his heroes stumble across two huge dinos fucking against a house.<\/p>\n
There\u2019s a heavy dose of hero worship on display here, not just from Mitchell but producer\u00a0J.J. Abrams\u00a0as well; you can practically hear their we\u2019re-not-worthy genuflecting mixed into the ambient background noise. But there\u2019s also an attempt to channel the sensation they had as kids of being wowed by big studio tentpoles with a human touch. And a very human sense of complexity: Everyone remembers the eye-popping mother ship connection at the end of\u00a0Close Encounters of the Third Kind.\u00a0Fewer people recall\u00a0the disturbing \u201ccrybaby\u201d sequence. The people behind this flashback do, however, and their tribute is filled with those kind of raw, emotional, rough-edged moments in between full-on dino carnage.<\/p>\n
If you\u2019ve been following David Robert Mitchell\u2019s career, it\u2019s easy to see bits of his odds-and-sods previous work poking out of this grab for the OG-blockbuster brass ring. There\u2019s the palpable sense of lived-in suburban life from his 2010 coming-of-age debut,\u00a0The Myth of the American Sleepover. There\u2019s the forward momentum and understanding of composing the frame for maximum effect that he displayed in his 2014 breakthrough\u00a0It Follows.\u00a0(Though by the time the 99th split-diopter shot shows up during a family conversation, you realize he maybe loves this filmmaking trick not wisely but too well?) And there\u2019s the feeling that true weirdness is always just one lysergic layer below reality that characterized his 2018 cult classic\u00a0Under the Silver Lake.\u00a0The fact that he\u2019s combined all of those elements and still hits the right notes for this karaoke take on yesteryear\u2019s summertime entertainment makes this feel like more than cheap nostalgia. It\u2019s not a question of whether or not they make \u2019em like this anymore. You\u2019re just stoked they were able to make something like this at all right now.<\/p>\n