The End of Oak Street

dir: David Robert Mitchell

2026

It feels like… we don’t get much of a break from 1980s Spielbergian nostalgia these days. It feels like… we’re kinda trapped in that era mentally? Whatever the internal longing for that era represents, I’m here to tell/beg you folks: it wasn’t a great time to be alive. A senile president plotted endless dumb ways to solve diplomatic disputes with warfare by any other name, the Middle East was consumed by death and destruction; interest rates were sky high, unemployment was rising. Petrol prices were through the roof, inflation was a scourge, and because of the movie War Games we all wondered whether a supercomputer was going to kill us all.

As we can see, nothing like today. So why the constant siren’s call of that fucking era? In the 1980s I can remember that there was a lot of nostalgia for the 1960s, but I’ve never read or seen much of anything that says the people in the 1960s were nostalgic for the 1940s, so I don’t know if it always runs in 20 year cycles. Kids today seem more obsessed with the 1990s, but what do I know? A few weeks ago a ‘young’ person was describing the music played at a club as being “very mid 2010s cringe” and I had no fucking idea what they were talking about.

Director David Robert Mitchell at least is old enough to remember the 80s, so I guess it’s not all about needle drops and corny signifiers picked up from other 80s movies and tv shows. I was hoping someone would be drinking a Tab or eating a Sunny Boy or a Zooper Dooper, and maybe eating some Whizz Fizz out of a little green bag with one of those cocaine scoop plastic spoons, but different people have different memories of that vaunted era. But there has to be more to life than this.

It wasn’t all Dungeons & Dragons, Cabbage Patch Dolls and New Coke for most of us. There was the threat of nuclear war and radioactive disasters like Chernobyl as well to think about.

It’s just that whenever anyone imagines struggling heteronormative families in suburbia, living lives of noisy desperation, for some reason the 80s keeps coming to mind, as if that’s when families and existential ennui were invented. People were dissatisfied with their lives for millennia before the 1980s, it’s just that they mostly were too busy trying to not starve or die to have the luxury of self-reflective moments.

So of course the premise being a middle class family finding itself at the mercy of dinosaurs is a hooky one, but really, we’re meant to think, the true enemy is living an unfulfilled, suburban life.

The suburbs are where people go to grow families but also strangle their hopes and dreams, according to this and many other movies about suburbia. The mother of this family, Denise (Anne Hathaway), is sick of this family, sick of her husband, and sick of being stifled by her life on Oak Street. Who can blame her? Her husband is played by Ewan McGregor, I mean, what a curse that would be. Greg, her oblivious hubbie, has lost his job but hasn’t told the family, and delivers pizzas for some extra cash, and even though she doesn’t know this for most of the film she resents deeply that he lives and breathes, and dreams of running away.

Her children, both teenagers, aren’t much chop either, though they’re clearly old enough not to need constant care. In other words, there isn’t that much wrong with her life that isn’t the same thing that’s wrong in anyone’s life who is tethered to others through the contract of marriage and the obligations of parenthood.

Her recourse, her escape, her refuge is writing, and it serves both as a way out perhaps financially down the track but also immediately, in that she’s happy when she’s writing about a woman who’s totally not her who gets to live her dreams by grabbing a yellow suitcase and fleeing from a family and suburb she finds oppressive.

It’s hard to know how to feel about this. I feel like… when I was watching Kate Winslet play virtually the same role in a flick called Revolutionary Road many years ago, I found it deeply moving and affecting, because her plight was the plight of every woman who society keeps in a state of servitude for the benefit of men generally and men specifically, ie. her appalling husband, and in the end it isn’t the road upon which they live or the neighbourhood or the gossiping neighbours that do her in, it’s the patriarchy but especially her husband that dooms her.

Maybe had the mother been played by someone other than Hathaway… I dunno, I empathise with people who feel trapped, who wants to feel trapped? That’s a terrible feeling for anyone, in any circumstance. But the flick doesn’t entirely help, because it pretty much says “is that what you REALLY want? Well, here you go!”

And so the rupture occurs, the disruption in the everyday, that allows Denise to grab a shotgun and start blasting away at dinosaurs as both catharsis and as her time to shine beyond just as a mommy and a provider. Let’s just say Hathaway is far better at selling the feral protective grizzly mama than she is as stifled artist strangled by suburbia.
Greg’s path is a far simpler one. He has no real identifiable characteristics other than that he is a dad-shaped character who says dad-shaped things, and is generally optimistic that everything will turn out okay even if there’s absolutely no evidence that such will be the case. He doesn’t wear the square glasses that an era-appropriate dad would wear, or that Rhys Darby would wear, because even at 55 he looks phenomenally better than any guy at that age should be allowed to look.

But he’s not living a life of quiet desperation, or loud desperation. He’s just keeping quiet, keeping out of the way, hoping that things will get better without actually doing anything to fix things, hoping a job with which to support his family will drop out of the sky and save him.

And delivering pizzas. Okay, so he may be a depressed middle-aged loser, but at least when push comes to shove… well, will he even be able to save his family?

Doesn’t seem likely. He seems like he might try to reason with the dinosaurs, find common ground, engage in a constructive conversation, see things from their point of view “maybe, you know, maybe we should just let them eat us. Seems like the polite thing to do…”

No, when he sees his wife threatened, even he will lash out and try to protect her. At least he’s good for something.

The two kids, well, if anyone deserved to get eaten by dinosaurs, it’s these two.

The daughter’s big scene is when, inexplicably to me, she takes herself off to the family station-wagon, plugs a tape into the tape player, and listens to the soothing sounds of Steve Winwood and sings along with him singing Valerie, call on me, Valerie, come and see I’m the same boy I used to be.

I mean, what the everliving fuck? No-one, not even women called Valerie or people who love women called Valerie have ever had an emotionally cathartic moment singing along with that fucking song. When that song came out it already sounded like a golden oldie for golden oldie radio, even in 1982. It makes you want to see teenagers, and Steve Winwood, eaten by rabid pterodactyls or something…

In lieu of personality the boy has a bow and arrow and keeps crying over his missing dog Starbuck, which, to be fair, is reasonable, because Starbuck is a blue heeler, and a little legend. I have to assume, since I can’t think of another time that I’ve ever seen an Australian working dog in an American movie, that this is some kind of nod to the staggering popularity of Bluey, but I can’t know for sure.

All I know is that the dog is worth at least three human characters, and no, nothing bad happens to the dog. It is illegal, in a family movie, for anything bad to happen to the dog.

Audiences won’t tolerate it. You can feed a thousand suburbanites (mostly offscreen) to the great thunder lizards of the past, but let one thing happen to the family pet, and people would start setting fire to cinemas / their own homes.

The temptation is to see this flick as an action / thriller successor to the Jurassic Park / World franchise, but ironically it’s not aiming for that direction despite being a less than subtle Spielberg homage from start to finish. It is a tiny bit more gruesome than those flicks, and actually operates more in the horror milieu. That the family is stranded where they are is meant to be more of a horrific premise, as in, they’re surrounded by a type of nature that doesn’t care about them but might eat them or stomp them if they get in the way, and that would be a terrible threat to the sanctity of the family.

They have their houses, but they don’t have the elements that make their houses havens, in that they don’t have water or power. They could barricade themselves away, but then they’ll starve to death. They have no one to help them against the dinosaurs, no outside authority or emergency services, but the dinosaurs aren’t out to get them, they’re just going to eat them anyway. Most of the dinos look kinda weird, and I think that’s deliberate (not just cheapness on the part of the production), especially since most of them are covered in feathers, and at least two of them look like they’re covered in fur, like woolly mammoths despite being, you know, plodding along diplodocuses (who also love to fuck, which is the weirdest scene I think I’ve ever seen in almost any movie I’ve ever seen, at least in terms of how Hathaway reacts to it all).

All this monster madness is only there to drag these parents out of their dull funk and into the light, where they could be the heroes they always hoped to be, and we’re meant to think “we would do what they did if we were in the same boat”.. However bleak things might seem, there is an exit, an out so contrived, so conceited, that it’s almost admirable how deus-y the ex machina is here. It’s an ending so bizarre, so cheesy, that it undoes what little happened in order to give the flick any feeling of stakes or anything mattering. I salute the chutzpah on display. Truly, Spielberg himself would applaud it “and then the alien’s finger glows and then all the bikes fly” level of magical thinking

It’s a bonkers flick, with I think some more positives than negatives to the experience, which I somehow enjoyed watching even though I know I shouldn’t have.

7 times at the end of Oak Street there’s an angry, disappointed mother holding a shotgun out of 10

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“Is that a fucking dinosaur?” – is there any other kind? - The End of Oak Street

https://www.imdb.com/video/vi826592025/