I am a huge fan of It Follows, so when I heard that the writer and director of that film, David Robert Mitchell was making a dinosaur movie I knew that I had to see it. It is strange to me that as many times as dinosaurs have escaped the park, they have never really broken out of the Jurassic Park franchise, giving that series exclusive ownership of our shared prehistory and many kids fascination, even as the results dimension with each sequel, requel, and reboot. I was excited to see a non-Jurassic dinosaur movie, one not tied to any Intellectual Propery and one made by a writer and director that had made something I liked before.
To be free from specific Intellectual Property is not to be free from influence and its anxieties, however. The term that comes up a lot with The End of Oak Street is "Spielbergian." I can see that in some respects, we get the kind of suburbia where Spielberg set some of his most influential films, and we get the general device where a mundane family conflict, in this case a marriage on the brink of divorce, is ultimately resolved by supernatural means. The family that fights dinosaurs together, stays together.
However, there is a darkness to this film that exceeds its source material. In some ways it might be closer to some of the "para-Spielbergian" films that Spielberg, and his company, Amblin Entertainment, made during the eighties, than any of Spielberg's films. Closer to Gremlins or Poltergeist than Jurassic Park. People are killed, cats are eaten, and all sorts of bloody carnage comes to the suburbs. To be honest the thing it most reminded me of were the Dinosaur Attacks trading cards from the late eighties, which were filled with all sorts of images of dinosaurs feasting on people.
The darkness is not just found in the blood and death, but in the way that it casts a kind of negative light on that central institution of the Spielberg film, the family. To recap the plot, a cosmic wormhole catapults a suburban neighborhood to an unspecified time period during the age of dinosaurs. (The mixture of species, Allosaurus coexisting with Stegosauruses, is unscientific, even if we get a few more feathers than previous films allowed. Science often conflicts with spectacle in these movies. ) The focus of the film is on the Platt family, Denise (Anne Hathaway) who dreams of being a writer working on a novel in the basement while claiming to do laundry; Greg (Ewan McGregor) who has not told his family that he has been laid off from his job and that his pizza delivery job is not just a side hustle but is his main source of income; Audrey (Maisy Stella) who dreams of studying physics with Carl Sagan at Cornell, and provides the necessary exposition about wormholes; and Brian (Christian Convery) who keeps secret his conflict with a bully in the neighborhood and his crush on a neighbor. As the trailer above indicates they are in some sense aware of the shared nature of their problem, the whole neighborhood has been transported, but for the most part they deal with it "as a family, boarding themselves in their home. The film vacillates on this point a bit, they do occasionally try to help their neighbors, but retreat at the sign of danger. One could argue that this bit of the plot reflects what suburbia is psychically, a vague sense of a community, of others who could need help, combined with a more immediate focus on the family.
Because this is a film made in 2026 there is a dog, Starbuck, who is both in need of saving, and saves the family. (He also starred in an ill conceived AI promo for the film, the less said about the better). The kids, Brian and Audrey, try to save Starbuck and that leads the whole family to go after them. I am not going to recap the whole plot here, but just bring up two plot points. [Spoiler Alert] The family eventually discovers that there are more worm holes, ones that potentially might lead back to the nineteen eighties, and in their attempt to save the dog, the kids, and find a way home the father, Greg is eaten by an allosaurus. Eventually they do find a way "back to the future" only to realize that they have made it back to Oak Street twenty minutes before they, it, and the whole neighborhood are transported back in time. Denise then makes a few phone calls, warning a few neighbors, and ordering a pizza. The pizza brings Greg, and the family is reunited. In getting a "do over "with Greg they essentially doom themselves, their doppelgängers from twenty minutes later to die, or at least struggle in the prehistoric past without a father.
The film ends with a kind of Back to the Future moment. Denise has abandoned her manuscript about a suburban housewife who longs for a life in the big city, and instead written The End of Oak Street the story of her and her family's time in the prehistoric past. The success of this book leads to a different life that we glimpse in a few minutes before the credits roll: Audrey can now afford to go to Cornell, and her fame and fortune means that her husbands job are no longer an issue. I enjoyed the dinosaurs, but I always do, I have seen every Jurassic Park film, but I found myself thinking about two things. One that it is literally Greg's side job (or supposed side job) that save him. It is because he is working nights delivering pizzas that Denise can make a phone call and get him off of the block that is doomed to become dinofood. Second, that there plan works, in part because they do not save themselves, and are thus spared the awkwardness (and the cost) of caring for their doubles. Doppelgängers are always a moment of pop political anthropology, one that leans in a decidedly Hobbesian direction, in which the more we are alike, the more we are in conflict.
There is something about the saving nature of the side gig, and Denise's decision to save her husband but not herself, that suggests that our look back on the eighties is filled with something other than nostalgia. Perhaps it takes a trip to a primeval forest to see the brutal struggle for survival that was always there.
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