The End of Oak Street is a flawed but engaging suburban survival experiment
The End of Oak Street is a film that has a high-concept premise and uses nostalgic filmmaking techniques to construct a B-movie. This film has its flaws, especially balancing its story of family and its creature features. Thankfully, good acting and technical elements of filmmaking help this movie and makes it a solid addition to summer sci-fi movies.
—————————————————————————————————————————
An Amblin-Inspired Creature Feature
The film’s strength is in its retro-suburban visual spectacle. Michael Giacchino’s score and Mike Gioulakis’s cinematography of the uncanny and the displacements of a suburban community drives the audience to appreciate the sharp craft. The bizarre combination of teleportation and dinosaurs has a cool contrast that many modern blockbuster movies miss. The film tries to create a balance of wonder and sense of familiarity in the face of a probably impossibly bold concept relating to a familiar community and suburban neighborhood.
Tonal focus is lacking which is a big disadvantage to the film. The narrative adaptation of survival horror movies involving dinosaurs is quite entertaining, but the script creates dissonance with the balance of light-hearted adventure with the real-world problems of a family in disarray. It really feels like two distinct movies that vie for the same space. The audience is left pondering if this movie would have been better if it completely doubled down either on the horror of the creatures or the family drama.
Hathaway and the Limits of Nostalgia
Anne Hathaway’s performance grounds the film in reality. Without an actor of her caliber, this film’s script would have made this movie totally unreal. Hathaway’s performance manages to capture urgency for the Platt family shown in other actors or the script. Her performance is enough of a reason to watch this film for anyone who enjoys character and genre driven films. She pulls off the perfect balance of terror and the film’s more light-hearted nostalgia.
On the other hand, the film reeks of tropes that are just uninspired and probably make even the biggest genre fans feel like the film leans too heavily on safe choices the film makes. The criticisms of the film that focus on it feeling like a Frankenstein monster of other films are completely warranted. The film bathes in 80’s aesthetics, but doesn’t have an original, compelling story and is built around a lack of creative writing. If you’re exhausted by the film industry’s obsession with retro aesthetics, you will feel like this film is a hollow, dry regurgitation of the genre instead of a progressive step forward.
Who Should Engage With This Neighborhood
This movie would appeal to people who are looking for a more polished, popcorn-friendly movie to watch that doesn’t require a lot of brain work. I think people who like creature features and family survival movies, would still like this movie, as long as they can get past the cheesy elements. If you like your sci-fi movies to be smarter and more original, you might get annoyed with the story because of the many gaps (and derivative structure).
I’d definitely skip this if you like your movies to be original and have lots of great writing. This movie just can’t decide if it’s a serious drama about the effects of displacement or if it’s just a fun monster movie, which slows the pace for people who like their movies to be more well thought out. It’s a good-looking movie, but it fails to distinguish itself from other, more modern movies using the same old tropes.
The End of Oak Street: Ending Explained
(Spoilers ahead) Like the unfortunate Platt family, we all learn that displacement is not always a quick rescue from the dullness of suburban life like it appears on the surface. Instead, we all learn the hard way that the suburbs provide us with comfort and security that is ultimately an illusion. From a storytelling perspective, the ending of the film makes it clear that in place of the normal, everyday suburban life, the family is faced with the enormous snake and other prehistoric monsters. With that, they are forced to leave the suburbs behind…and so will they have to leave their past identity…and with that their old life.
