The End Of Oak Street

Little Acorns

The End Of Oak Street
Directed by David Robert Mitchell
USA  2026
Warner Brothers
UK Cinema Release Print 
(unfortunately... I didn’t know!).

Warning: Very minor spoilers.

So this was better than I expected and, to be fair, I wasn’t going to bother with The End Of Oak Street. I mean, c’mon, I’d seen the trailers... which made it look like a reboot of an old episode of The Twilight Zone at best and, certainly, yet another recycled 1930s-50s sci-fi idea ransacked for modern, literature starved, cinema audiences. Which... to be fair... it is. 

Then I found out it was written and directed by David Robert Mitchell, who wrote and directed two startlingly good films of recent years. Namely, the amazing It Follows (reviewed by me here) and the even more brilliant Under The Silver Lake (reviewed by me here). So as bad as the trailer made it out to be (which seems to be a common problem with modern trailers, as I’ve mentioned before... they just don’t sell the movie)... I knew I would have to go and see it on the strength of the writer/director. 

And, yeah, okay... there’s nothing new here. You’ve seen (and almost certainly read) something like this before but... just as It Follows was a great take on making a film with the style of an old, 1980s John Carpenter horror movie, The End Of Oak Street is an example of making a film which both looks... and is set in... a Spielbergian slice of early to mid 1980s American suburbia blockbuster. Even down to composer Michael Giacchino’s pitch perfect, on-the-nose imitation, John Williams style score (although, to be fair, it’s a Giacchino style score too... which often sounds very similar anyway). Although why a teenager in the 1980s is reading what looks to be a 1950s copy of Playboy under the covers is anybody’s guess.

The story is about a disfunctional family unit played by Ewan McGregor (the dad), Anne Hathaway (the mum) plus Maisy Stella and Christian Convery (their kids). Things aren’t going well but, similar to what happens in Valley Of The Dragons (review coming soon and also, eventually, the book it was based on, Jules Verne’s Off On A Comet), a ripple in time displaces some people but only temporally. So the whole, large neighbourhood, in this case, is snatched up and dragged back to prehistoric times. A fight for survival midst dinosaur shenanigans ensues. 

And there are no real surprises but, like I said, the whole thing is pretty well done, has some great acting and... while it has its problems, it does get from A to B in an entertaining and relatively thrilling fashion and it’s certainly a good, large screen spectacle to keep audiences pleased.

Now, if I had one minor problem for a David Robert Mitchell film it’s this... it feels a lot like it’s pulling its punches. 

For example, anyone who even saw the trailer will be suspecting a certain death scene coming up from very early on. The family unit has some problems which a struggle for survival and the death of a character would fix (although the writer’s pick for the ‘gets eaten by a dino’ death is not quite as young as I was expecting). However, I did feel like the movie was soft soaping things and trying to have its cake and eat it at the same time. There is a deux ex machina ‘undo’ button at one point which, personally, I thought was totally unnecessary and certainly a less happy ending seemed to be the one this film deserved. And even the lesbian relationship subtext, which I also saw coming, is hardly hinted at and not made as blatant as I suspect the director wanted. 

Now, I don’t know if all of this is studio interference but, well, one thing which did bother me about this movie... and I would have certainly stayed away from cinemas if I’d know it... is that I hadn’t realised the film had been cut for UK audiences. They deliberately toned it down for us so they could get more people in by calling it a 12A instead of a 15 certificate and, frankly, I’m appalled. The BBFC really ought to be called out for the absolute evil people they are. Don’t allow greedy film-makers to soft soap their art just to appease stupid censors... just make everything either an 18 or a U. End of story. 

So, yeah, The End Oak Street is a nice little entry into the science fiction genre and I’d certainly recommend it to some but, what all this means is that a) I’m going to have to buy the Blu Ray when it gets released so I can see the full cut and b) there’s no way I’m buying British on this thing. I’ll have to import a US Blu Ray like every other sane, movie lover would do when faced by the vile horror of the British Board Of Film Censors. I wish we could scoop them up and send them back to prehistoric times, for sure.