Dinosaur movies should be fun. This shouldn't be controversial.
Of course, it shouldn't be controversial to say superhero movies should be fun, either. Still, we've had enough grim, three-hour slogs featuring desaturated supersuits and self-serious ruminations on the nature of destiny to keep us frowning into branded popcorn buckets for years.
The new dinosaur movie The End of Oak Street is, thank goodness, a lot of fun. It begins in 1982, with the Platt family living an ordinary life in their suburban house. Mom Denise (Anne Hathaway) is an aspiring writer who can feel her marriage to dad Greg (Ewan McGregor) slipping underwater as he takes side jobs delivering pizza to bring in extra money and misses family activities like the neighborhood block party. Their son Brian (Christian Convery) dearly loves the family dog and lives in fear of a local bully who's looking to beat him up. Daughter Audrey (Maisy Stella) feels awkward around some of the other teenagers of her acquaintance, particularly as her friends are coupling up. It's all pretty normal family stuff, until there is a dimensional rift of some sort (Audrey, a Carl Sagan fan, suspects a wormhole) and they end up displaced into prehistory.
It's not just them, it's the whole neighborhood. There are a couple of flashes of light, and a plant where that plant should not be, and then the family (cleverly separated from each other in order to allow for several different moments of discovery) realizes that there are dinosaurs about, and those dinosaurs are hungry.
What happens after that is one part family action-adventure, with lots of running and bonding and taking up weapons of self-defense, and one part true horror, with local residents being stalked and rather mercilessly devoured by dinosaurs. (The meat-eating ones, that is. There are also some who are chill vegetarians interested in munching on some foliage and not bothering anybody. Hashtag not all dinosaurs.)
The writer and director here, David Robert Mitchell, is best known for the modern horror classic It Follows, about a young woman being pursued relentlessly by a malevolent force that can inhabit the bodies of both strangers and people she knows. They walk toward her, slowly, sometimes in the background of a shot, sometimes without her knowing. Much of that film is about dread, and there's certainly one sequence in Oak Street that calls to mind the It Follows model of an approaching peril of which its target is not aware. Mitchell is very, very good at this stuff. You may very well find yourself biting your tongue so as not to yell an old-fashioned "LOOK BEHIND YOU!" at the screen.
But The End of Oak Street is also raucous and silly — intentionally — in a way that fits the material. It's easy to watch the early moments of the dino-occupation wondering whether the funny parts are meant to be funny or not. But by the end, it's quite clear that Mitchell has the tone fully under control, and that what is over-the-top is meant to be so. He and cinematographer Mike Gioulakis, who also did It Follows, continue to experiment with camera techniques, including wide angles and experimentation with focus. While it's fairly unobtrusive most of the time, that flexibility helps the film feel more rewarding as a theatrical experience and considerably more distinctive as a genre movie than it otherwise might.
Wisely, The End of Oak Street comes in at only a little over an hour and a half. There is nothing inherently wrong with a long movie, but an adventure film like this can often bog down in an interminable middle that is obsessed with either morality or lore. Why has this rift in time happened? This movie, refreshingly, doesn't care. What does this all mean as a societal lesson? Again, the movie doesn't care. That doesn't mean it's only about dinosaurs; in the end, it's very much about loving your family and taking care of your neighbors. But there's no secret underground government conspiracy, there's no alien rock buried a million years ago that made it happen, and there's no ponderous "what we learned from all this was..." voiceover.
The structure is simple: You meet the family, the family gets in the way of some dinosaurs, the family runs from the dinosaurs, and the family has a climactic confrontation with the dinosaurs. If you see it with a crowd (which you should), the crowd will laugh and gasp. The crowd will feel sad and worried. The crowd will feel relieved.
It's a really good time at the movies, and we all deserve that.
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