But that’s now changed.
Like a bolt of prehistoric lightning, David Robert Mitchell’s The End of Oak Street has ironically delivered the best Steven Spielberg dinosaur movie the Beard never made himself. This is not to say Oak Street is another Jurassic Park redo—the happily schlocky picture makes no bones about being a techno thriller, nor bothers to waste a minute lamenting the hubris of man. Instead it’s an older school riff on a different style of Spielbergian cinema; the type he’d produce under the Amblin banner and that would’ve been helmed by Richard Donner or a young Bob Zemeckis in the ‘80s. Mitchell even sets his popcorn in 1982, the same year the writer-director would’ve been eight, and the film’s core family ensemble includes a 13-year-old boy among its ranks.
Made in the vein of Gremlins or Back to the Future with a body count, Oak Street is also meaner than any of the modern Jurassic World flicks. It’s basically a Twilight Zone episode where, rather inexplicably, a whole neighborhood is transported back in time hundreds of millions of years. There’s no rhyme or reason, but there is a literal cast of dozens of American suburbanites who suddenly find themselves on the buffet table for a scaly party that includes Spinosauruses, winged demons, a feathery giant chicken with fangs, and of course a T-Rex. It’s madcap and delightful entertainment in the hands of a director who helped kickstart our current age of “elevated horror” with It Follows.
Mitchell even finds time to craft a simple, but effective, story about a family in crisis as led by Ewan McGregor and Anne Hathaway, two actors who give the material more gravitas than it needs, but look oh so awesome when swinging sledge hammers and shotguns at attacking dinos.
All of which makes the fact that the movie is being almost quietly jettisoned into theaters at the end of this summer a tad baffling. The thing rips and roars, but neither McGregor or Hathaway have done much press for the movie. Elsewhere the marketing team invested in a woeful AI video focused purely on the adorable dog in the movie doing “a podcast interview” with other AI canines.
Three decades later, Hollywood still seems sheepishly afraid to admit they’re playing in Spielberg’s ballpark. But the thing is Mitchell is only about the fourth guy to do so without Jurassic in the title, and he went ahead and made the best one since Spielberg’s dino-eye roamed Isla Nublar and he shouldn’t be the last.
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