The End of Oak Street Review: The Best Dinosaur Movie in Decades

If you’re a fan of the Jurassic Park films (and the franchise’s global box office suggests many of you are), you might have always wondered what it would be like if their dinosaurs roared, chomped, and smashed around suburbia on the big screen. Though Steven Spielberg’s The Lost World: Jurassic Park certainly gave us a little taste of the urban fallout of a dino attack back in the ’90s, subsequent Jurassic films have largely been preoccupied with going bigger or getting bogged down in the “Park” part of “Jurassic Park.”

Luckily, The End of Oak Street is here to show us exactly what might happen if a variety of roaming dinosaurs had the opportunity to pick the bones of a suburban neighborhood clean, and it’s pretty damn spectacular. Perhaps even more surprisingly, director David Robert Mitchell (It Follows) seems to be capable of making a better and riskier Spielberg film than Spielberg himself in the year of our lord 2026.

Indeed, there are plenty of charmingly old-school Amblin vibes in The End of Oak Street, which sees a family on the verge of falling apart transported to dangerous dinosaur times along with the rest of their quaint neighborhood, leaving a block party in 1982 behind with no idea what happened or why. Anne Hathaway plays teary matriarch Denise Platt, yearning for a more rewarding life while Ewan McGregor’s Greg Platt is the upbeat father who would rather try to fix everything himself than let the cracks show. Their kids, Audrey (Maisy Stella) and Brian (Christian Convery), are fully aware of the tension between the two parents, sensing that their picturesque life is one argument away from the flutter of divorce papers.

Mitchell pushes the boundaries of the movie’s PG-13 rating to its absolute limits as he subjects the rocky Platt family to a string of sudden, violent dinosaur incursions, but first he spends a good chunk of The End of Oak Street introducing his characters and letting us hang out with them. The writer-director understands that we actually need to care about the Platts to want them to live through his wild science fiction tale and force us to the edge of our seats during their most perilous encounters, especially since the reason they’ve found themselves in this mess is hand-waved away because it doesn’t really matter.

Once rumored to be yet another Cloverfield tale from producer J.J. Abrams, The End of Oak Street is actually more than happy to embrace its “what if?” Twilight Zone and Ray Bradbury influences—Frank Frazetta would have had a whale of a time illustrating the book cover for this one—and trusts you to simply climb aboard the ludicrous adventure of it all instead of weighing the script down with unnecessary exposition. Frankly, it’s a breath of fresh air in an era where Hollywood feels that the audience needs to have its hand held through every plot point and character nuance.

The dinosaurs themselves are also impressive. More accurately depicted than in the Jurassic Park movies, they hunt the Platts’ neighborhood and are a genuinely scary natural force. Industrial Light & Magic has pulled out all the stops to make the film’s CGI as believable as possible, and Mitchell cannily draws on his It Follows experience to build tension as the dinos sneak up on his characters. Sometimes, we see just a brief flash of threat when they’re distracted; they’re always in danger, and Mitchell relies on this constant dread to propel the film through its white-knuckle third act.

He’s playful with it, too, peppering The End of Oak Street with pleasing split diopter shots and other flourishes that would feel right at home in Jaws, The Goonies, or E.T. Not content to flatten the richness of his immaculately recreated 1982, Mitchell also steers clear of the sort of muddy color grading that could have seen the film feel right at home on streaming. Instead it looks and feels like a real movie made for the projector, and has a score to match its ambition, with Michael Giacchino in fine form channeling ’80s John Williams and knowing his deeper Lost and Fringe bona fides are absolutely the correct match for this sci-fi story and its visuals. It weds well with popcorn cheer moments like when a ferocious Hathaway takes aim with a shotgun at a Tyrannosaurus.

The End of Oak Street’s trailers have hidden all the best bits of the film—at a cost. When you sit down to watch it, you’ll find that a bunch of its shocking, hilarious, and truly unexpected moments pay off when the lights are down and the audience around you is along for the ride, but there will likely be many people who saw a clip online or playing before another movie and shrugged, including me. I had no interest or intention of seeing The End of Oak Street until the screening invitation, but I’m so glad I gave it a chance. Yet facing similar levels of anticipation from casual audiences, Warner Bros. will either have a surprise hit on its hands buoyed by word of mouth or a total flop. It would be a real shame if it’s the latter, but that’s the gamble of getting back into the original movies game.

As I left the theater, I heard a group of younger audience members chatting through their own The End of Oak Street impressions. “You’ve made a movie set in 1982 starring Ewan McGregor, and you don’t make a Star Wars reference? What a missed opportunity,” one of them cried. Therein lies another problem. Unlike some of us aging Amblin heads, there are a lot of people out there who have been Stranger Things pilled up the wazoo, and the mere idea of setting a movie in the 1980s and not overstuffing it with pop culture references for people to point at seems wrong somehow. The End of Oak Street’s design allows for a few quality needle drops, the odd film poster on a bedroom wall, and a dog named Starbuck, but it isn’t interested in celebrating its period setting the way that Stranger Things does. Rather its intention is to feel like it was actually made alongside the best sci-fi movies of the era.

Mitchell is more successful in that endeavor here than Abrams was with 2011’s Super 8, but it still might be too earnest an approach for anyone more interested in a broader meta sci-fi swing. For those who want to check out a genuinely great rollercoaster of a dinosaur movie this summer, however, The End of Oak Street delivers the best one in decades.

The End of Oak Street opens on Friday, Aug. 14.