A note before going further: mild spoilers follow. It was easy to harbor doubts about The End of Oak Street, a suburban, time-traveling dinosaur movie starring Anne Hathaway and Ewan McGregor, right up until the credits. The expectation was another forgettable monster picture. The reality, by many accounts, is that David Robert Mitchell’s self-assured sci-fi spectacle is one of the best movie-watching experiences of the summer.
The setup is pure genre. On a stormy night in 1982, a suburban family witnesses a blinding flash of light near their home, the thunderstorm stops abruptly, the power cuts out, and the air turns thick and sweltering. By morning, the neighbors are being torn apart by dinosaurs, and the quiet cul-de-sac has become a survival horror. Mitchell wastes little time sending the neighborhood back in time.
What lifts the film above its premise is heart. Mitchell steadily elaborates on his characters’ inner lives even as the creatures ravage the block, and the movie works precisely because that emotional groundwork is laid first. In doing so, it makes a quiet argument for how little a filmmaker actually needs to craft a delightful, snackable spectacle, a point that lands as an implicit rebuke to what the Jurassic Park franchise has been doing for a decade.
Before the chaos, the film builds the rocky but still loving marriage at its center. Denise, played by Hathaway, has secretly written a novel and shares it with a neighbor, who reads in it a fantasy of leaving suburban life behind. Her husband Greg, meanwhile, hides his recent unemployment and his drinking, quietly working part-time as a pizza delivery driver. Those small, human deceptions give the monster movie its stakes.
At 99 minutes, The End of Oak Street testifies to the power of a nearly extinct blockbuster formula, one in which the running time is packed with stars, meaty stories and actual feeling rather than spectacle alone. It is the rare summer creature feature that remembers its people first, and it is better for it.
