The End of Oak Street Review

In 2026, everyone is chasing Steven Spielberg, even Spielberg himself. The legendary director released his first sci-fi movie in a decade to muted applause. Netflix teamed up with Fast X director Louis Leterrier for a claustrophobic Lovecraftian thriller with Spielberg vibes. Both of those movies are enjoyable in their own ways, but they pale in comparison to output from Spielberg’s heyday.

Next up is the director of the indie horror hit It Follows with a Jurassic Park riff that swaps genetics for time travel and miraculously works.

David Robert Mitchell’s The End of Oak Street takes an absurd premise of a suburban neighborhood suddenly warped into prehistoric times and turns it into the sort of classic Amblin romp you would stumble across while channel surfing and watch through to the end. The End of Oak Street more than makes up for a summer without an actual Jurassic World sequel.

Oak Street stars Anne Hathaway and Ewan McGregor as Denise and Greg Platt, a pair of 40-something parents barely keeping their marriage together. Greg has a drinking problem and delivers pizzas at night to make ends meet. Denise spends her free time writing a novel that spells out her fantasies of abandoning her marriage and children for a new life. Their daughter Audrey, played by Maisey Stella, just graduated high school and wants to go to Cornell to study astronomy with Carl Sagan, but knows her parents cannot afford the tuition. Their teenage son Brian, played by Christian Convery, has been acting out and smoking cigarettes. There is also a family dog named Starbuck.

The problems of modern suburbia are thrown to the curb when the entire neighborhood is transported back in time through a wormhole to an era when dinosaurs ruled the world. Mitchell plays the big reveal with classic Spielberg coyness. At first we see a prehistoric plant, an inexplicably large pile of poop, and a geyser of steamy water bursting from a crack in the sidewalk. Then a large spiky tail disappears behind some bushes, and a feathery face appears that is too big and sharp to be a modern bird. Oak Street looks more like Jurassic Park Avenue.

The dinosaurs are magnificent, rendered with the feathers and fuzzy hair that scientists now know dinosaurs sported without losing the fearsome nature imbued by Spielberg 30 years ago. This is a movie where dinosaurs repeatedly slaughter and eat random humans, and each kill drew applause from the theater audience. Mitchell and his team also take creative swings with creature designs that largely pay off, including a family of large rocky turtles and a terrifying silent serpent as long as a train with rows of impossibly sharp teeth.

The humans are somewhat less impressive. Hathaway and McGregor are charming, but the chemistry between them never clicks. Their daughter Audrey mostly exists to drop exposition about quantum physics and wormholes, which never amount to anything beyond hand-wavey exposition since the Avengers explained time travel. Brian is perhaps the weakest of the Platt clan, set up to be a rebel teen but never doing much besides complaining and crying. The displaced neighborhood includes two-dimensional supporting characters like an eighties bully, a cute girl who just moved in down the street, and an annoying neighbor. Mitchell plays with the conceit that these archetypes matter less in a crisis, but never digs deep enough to make a resonant point.

Maybe that is because Mitchell already proved he could do great character work in It Follows and Under the Silver Lake, and his focus here is entirely on the spectacle of these big hulking behemoths and their world. In that effort, he succeeds. The pieces for a great Spielberg adventure are here, but they are never assembled in the most poignant order. You will not care when watching the Platts flee from one suburban set-piece to the next is this much fun.

Oak Street gestures at an explanation for its wacky premise, leading to a final sequence epic enough to smooth over any flaws. At one point in that final stretch, the spectator next to me, who announced before the movie started that he was in a bad mood and expected to hate it, raised two hands up above his head in triumphant glee at a moment of pure Spielbergian bliss involving a heroic dog.

If the summer of 2026 has taught us anything, it is that nobody can recapture the magic of classic eighties Spielberg, not even the man himself. The End of Oak Street proves that you can still get pretty close.

The End of Oak Street premieres Friday, Aug. 14 in theaters.

 

Source: Polygon