There are all sorts of ways to dress up a dinosaur movie so it isn’t “just” a dinosaur movie. You can make it a case of characters time traveling into the distant past, or the dinosaurs time traveling into the present. You can give it to an acclaimed director, known for seminal independent horror like It Follows. You can even allow that director to use all sorts of fancy camera work, like the split diopter shot, which allows both the foreground of the shot and the background of the shot to be in focus at the same time.

But at the end of the day, it’s still just dinosaurs destroying things and threatening people. And now that we’re 33 years past Jurassic Park and we’ve even lost Sam Neill, that really doesn’t seem so interesting. We don’t really care how or why the dinosaurs got there. We can sigh in boredom either way.

Actually, there are uniquely distinguishing elements in David Robert Mitchell’s The End of Oak Street, but they distinguish the film in the wrong way. One of these is an unusually short running time for a movie involving dinosaurs, as this film clocks in at just 99 minutes. And while a movie critic is never going to look a gift short movie in the mouth, you notice the failures in character development and the strange pacing that result from such a lack of celluloid minutes. Though it’s not clear The End of Oak Street would really work even fleshed out by another half-hour.

The film focuses on a suburban neighbourhood in 1982 and one particular family living in it. That’s father Greg (Ewan McGregor), mother Denise (Anne Hathaway), daughter Audrey (Maisy Stella) and son Brian (Christian Convery). Let’s not forget the loyal and spunky family dog, Starbuck. You can tell the Platt family lives in a 1982 that Steven Spielberg would have loved – that was the year E.T. came out, remember – because there’s a plucky score by Pixar composer Michael Giacchino, and the streets are lousy with enough bicycles to make Stranger Things jealous.

The homage to Spielberg moves forward another 11 years when there’s a strange weather phenomenon one night, which leads both to a loss of electricity and a loss of running water. Also, why is the air so warm and humid? That giant pile of faeces in the neighbour’s yard is not a practical joke executed by the Platt children because the nasty neighbour has threatened to shoot their dog if their dog crosses onto his property again. No, that’s dinosaur shit.

The timing of the dinosaur shit is just one of the ways this film is half-baked. It appears in the lawn a full day before the strange weather phenomenon. If we’re meant to believe that the Platts’ neighbourhood, with Oak Street as its spine, has been transplanted by 200 million years, when exactly did this transplantation occur? Certainly before the strange weather phenomenon, and certainly before Denise was able to ask her botanist friend about a weird plant in their yard that appears to have grown overnight but has been extinct for hundreds of millennia. But then why weren’t dinosaurs chomping them or their neighbours a few days ago, and why did they continue to have power and water?

It may be to the credit of The End of Oak Street that it does not attempt to explain these things. Films can certainly get bogged down on dialogue that tries to cover up screenwriting gaffes and provide grand unifying theories for strange phenomena. Most of us would agree it’s better to focus on what you’re here for: dinosaurs interacting with 1982 era neighbourhood props, and giant snakes slithering through family homes. That last is probably the best of a comparatively small number of set pieces.

But without some egghead explaining why this plate of earth and its 70 homes has gone through a portal to sometime before that asteroid hit, we’re left with a strange emptiness in trying to assign logic to the whole thing. That strange emptiness is compounded by the film’s tonal shifts, as it goes from the almost featherweight lightness of Giacchino’s score, which comes with a guarantee that nothing truly bad could ever happen, to dark and serious occurrences that punch you in the gut. That can be a mode, but it never feels anything less than awkward in The End of Oak Street.

Then suddenly, because of the overall brevity, events are wrapping up in a way that further defies rules, but wait, there never were any rules. Mitchell’s film invites us to witness an unexplained oddity and then decides to resolve it just as quickly and with just as little explanation, leaving only the surface pleasures to nourish us. And those surface pleasures aren’t good enough, especially since they rely on people running away from dinosaurs, an activity they have engaged in at the movies for time immemorial.

Perhaps the most disappointing aspect of The End of Oak Street is Mitchell’s contributions as a writer and director, even if the split diopter shots look cool. Mitchell has tried never to make himself any one thing, as It Follows was followed by the sprawling LA noir Under the Silver Lake, which was plagued by the opposite problem of being too long. That came out in 2018 and Mitchell hasn’t made a film since then, just increasing our appetite for what this intriguing cinematic voice would bring next. That it would be just the latest entry in the Spielberg nostalgia racket is disappointing indeed.

 

The End of Oak Street is currently playing in cinemas.