By Marc S. Sanders
I look at a movie like The End Of Oak Street and I think to myself didn’t we once have all that we needed? As kids raised in suburban life, we had our share of turmoil when mom and dad wouldn’t stop bickering and the neighborhood bully wouldn’t leave us alone. However, Superman bedding, books on dinosaurs and the solar system, and a dog named Starbuck, along with neighborhood barbecues and a local library made up for a lot. Movies like Gremlins, The Goonies and E.T. from the early 1980s were spared the onslaught zombified characters brainwashed by the World Wide Web, delivered by means of portable electronic devices. In order to escape danger, you ran or pedaled as fast as you could while screaming your head off. When you had a moment of respite, you stretched your imagination to logically surmise why the science fiction you always read about was actually coming true.
When I saw those movies in the theaters and later rented from the video store, I didn’t have to reflect. These were fresh tellings of new adventures with honest and relatable issues that might have been happening in other homes, just like they occurred in my house. The End Of Oak Street invites you to reminisce while welcoming today’s generation to look beyond their Play Stations and A.I. reliance. It’s a simple and familiar film not out to challenge you like a complex standardized test. Writer/director David Robert Mitchell only wants to thrill your discoveries as they follow a terrifying, inescapable journey.
The Platt family do their best to maintain a family nucleus. Audrey and Brian (Maisy Stella, Christian Convery) are siblings who rely on each other while their parents, Denise and Greg (Anne Hathaway, Ewan MacGregor) seem like they are teetering on the unheard of D-word. When I was growing up, only one kid in my school had divorced parents – far from what my daughter witnesses. The family’s slivers of divide, along with that pesky bully and an irate neighbor who literally threatens to shoot Starbuck, take a back seat to strange occurrences of flashing lights at night and mounds of animal poop in the backyard. There’s also plant life that grows quickly out of the ground, yet is of unknown origin.
The day after the biggest flash happens, the Platts discover that their suburban neighborhood has been transported to prehistoric times when dinosaurs run amok. Like a familiar franchise, these animals are ready to chase, roar and eat the neighbors. The Platts seem to have the best luck at surviving though. Now they have to figure out how to stick together, stay alive, hope that Starbuck comes home, and get back to present day, 1982.
The dinosaurs resemble the creatures of the Jurassic Park/World pictures. David Robert Mitchell introduces some new breeds with toothlike delights, though. My favorite was some kind of giant snake or eel that can gracefully enter a home from the upstairs bedroom and silently wind its way through the hallways, staircase and down to the kitchen before it quietly opens its wide maw with enormous fangs that are ready to bite down on Anne Hathaway. Outstanding work!
There are triceratops and raptors and “veggies-saurouses,” and pterodactyls that claw and nibble and bite and roar and chase. It’s nothing novel after twenty Jurassic movies. Still, the time period and setting are new to this standard and the cast is genuine, well mostly. Anne Hathaway hearkens back to the stressed suburban mom that Dee Wallace Stone delivered in E.T. She’s a good housemaker at her wit’s end with a dream for another kind of life. Ewan McGregor’s European dialect is hard to ignore. So, he doesn’t exactly feel like that dad with the Adidas shorts, tube socks and white tennis shoes. Greg delivers pizzas to make ends meet. It was hard to buy a guy with an accent designed for highbrow Shakespeare dropping off a large pie with everything on it. The character is drafted well as the paternal figure who is not the king of his castle and lacking all the answers. McGregor just feels more intelligent than Brian Platt is supposed to be. In this movie, dad doesn’t drive. Mom drives the car and wields the gun. Craig T Nelson (Poltergeist) would never stand for that. Oscar Isaac was originally meant to play the role. He would have been a more appropriate choice.
The End Of Oak Street works like a rainy Saturday afternoon picture at the neighborhood theater when you’d be dropped off at the mall by mom while she ran her errands. Bicycles and homemade bows and arrows fend your way through the made-up adventures in the woods or between the homes and within the backyards.
Again, dinosaurs are nothing new or novel anymore, but David Robert Mitchell sets up a handful of shocking moments that will drop your jaw as some characters wind up in unexpected peril. Other times you laugh as the Platts can only run across well mowed lawns, from one end of the street to the other. It’s adventure, but this family also has time to come to grips with their hang ups while running out of food and avoiding being consumed by their unfamiliar environment.
Anne Hathaway is especially right in this time period, and she only makes McGregor look more suitable in this middle Americana period setting. When he speaks, I hear Obi Wan Kenobi and Trainspotting, but at least Hathaway keeps him engaged as a husband device for her performance as the frustrated, neglected housewife.
The End Of Oak Street is a welcome passage of escape to a time when visual effects were being embraced as a means to tell wondrous stories of imagination. It’s fortunate, that on the surface, its technology stops at the chapter of a once familiar now, when social media wasn’t needed to save your life, much less solve your problems. The family had to sleep on the family room floor together, and then assemble in a circle to talk to one another about whatever was bothering them.
JJ Abrams’ studio Bad Robot produced this film. He also directed Super 8, a clear salute to Steven Spielberg’s alien adventures that’ll thrill you and make you ugly cry. This is the director/producer’s specialty-to echo how much these films shaped so many of us into adulthood. I hope Abrams and his production crew stay on this trajectory. I’d like to play in the past a little more before I head back to my future.
2 UNPAID MOVIE CRITICS!!!! 