"The End of Oak Street" shows the "Jurassic World" films where the dinosaur pees
The new film starring Anne Hathaway and Ewan McGregor brings the dinosaurs back from the exotic islands to the perfect American suburb of the 80s - and finds there a successful combination of fantasy, horror, and action. With a relatively modest budget, precise period design, music that manages a dialogue with John Williams, and one family forced to survive in the Mesozoic era, the result is an imperfect but enjoyable film.
In "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" and "E.T.", Steven Spielberg effectively merged fantasy genres with a "Norman Rockwell-esque" version of the American suburb. This connection was amplified in the films he produced ("Poltergeist", "The Goonies", "Gremlins", "Back to the Future") and became an element associated with American cinema of the 80s. In the "Jurassic Park" trilogy and the sequel trilogy "Jurassic World", the obvious connection between suburban Americana and dangerous animals was not made. When dinosaurs mixed in the "ordinary" human environment (unlike Isla Nublar and Isla Sorna), it was done in a very limited and unsatisfactory way. In "The End of Oak Street", written and directed by David Robert Mitchell, the connection between dinosaurs and an "ordinary" human living environment is finally made - and done well. A film that is not without flaws but offers more successful and enjoyable cinematic entertainment than all the "Jurassic Park" sequels.
Mitchell has shown an attraction to the suburban environment in his previous works. From his debut film "The Myth of the American Sleepover" (2010), a nostalgic coming-of-age drama set in the Detroit suburbs, to the acclaimed horror film "It Follows" (2014), which was filmed mostly in this environment. His latest film "Under the Silver Lake" (2018) was an ambitious attempt to design a space of confusion and strangeness under the influence of David Lynch. The film failed financially and put Mitchell in "director's jail" for eight years. Since then, "Silver Lake" has received a justified re-evaluation, and now Mitchell has been given a chance to rehabilitate himself as a commercial filmmaker.
Budget constraints as an advantage
"The End of Oak Street" has a medium budget (80 million dollars). It is required to do a lot on a low budget compared to those of the dinosaur trilogies. In inflation-adjusted values, the three films of the "Jurassic Park" trilogy cost about twice as much, "Jurassic World" cost 2.5 times as much, and the two films concluding the second trilogy cost 7.5 times as much. Budget constraints can also be an advantage. Mitchell's film is relatively short (99 minutes), and it is required to present the source of the threat in a more implied, half-hidden, or indirect way. There is also more emphasis on the relationships between the family members under siege. It is not a multi-layered drama with nuances, but compared to the standard in dinosaur films, this is a significant improvement.
The exposition of "The End of Oak Street" can be conveyed with a bingo card of the 80s cinematic suburb: the clothes, the meticulous period design, the group of kids in the style of "Stand by Me", the community event, the "bully", the girl who could be the object of teenage love, etc. The music written by the talented composer Michael Giacchino conducts a constant correspondence with that of John Williams. However, cracks must be exposed that will turn what comes next into a process of overcoming. Mitchell and his regular cinematographer Michael Gioulakis often use split diopter shots to create a visual illustration of these cracks, a trick used by Brian De Palma to create a conspiratorial space design.
The Platt family under siege
The Platt family looks from the outside like the perfect family, but the father Greg (Ewan McGregor) has lost his job and supplements his income by delivering pizzas. The mother Denise (Anne Hathaway) is embarrassed by the pizza sign on the family car and discovers decreasing patience for the way Greg hides things from her. Denise is working on a book in which she reveals the wilder and less satisfied side of family life. Exactly for such things, time loops were created that are about to throw the quiet neighborhood of Flowerwill into the Mesozoic era.
They have two children: the older girl Audrey, who dreams of studying astronomy, and Brian, 13, who is very attached to the family dog, Starbuck. The neighbor Mel, who threatens to shoot the stray dog, is clearly marked as appetizer #1 when the dinosaurs arrive. On the horizon of the suburb, there are now active volcanoes, and wild vegetation grows rapidly next to the manicured lawns. In the way the dinosaurs are presented, there are elements that were missing in the "Jurassic Park" films: feathered dinosaurs, humor, and even dinosaur mating. Mitchell tests the boundaries of the PG-13 rating as it was accepted in the 80s. This is not low-budget hack work, but work that is skilled in aspects of design, cinematography, music, and acting, creating tension and evoking a variety of emotional responses in viewers.
