The End of Oak Street is a retro film in numerous ways. There’s the Back to the Future meets Jurassic Park conceit. And then the way the 1980s white suburban nuclear family simultaneously overcomes both improbable disaster and a woman’s career ambitions. Director David Robert Mitchell complicates things somewhat by acknowledging the existence of non-white and LGBT people. But the antediluvian tropes ultimately stomp most thematic subtlety beneath their giant brontosaur forefeet, for better or worse.
The troubled 1982-era suburban family in question is the Platts. Greg (Ewan McGregor) is an easy-going guy whose odd and apparently unnecessary shifts as a pizza delivery guy annoy wife Denise (Anne Hathaway). Denise is secretly writing a novel about her domestic unhappiness and her desire to escape her spiraling marriage. Daughter Audrey (Maisy Stella) dreams of studying astronomy with Carl Sagan, though she knows the family doesn’t have the money to send her to college. Younger son Brian (Christian Convery) is discovering girls, especially new neighbor Jeannette (Jordan Alexa Davis). But his main passion is still for his loyal dog.
These troubles suddenly look minuscule when the family’s suburban neighborhood suddenly falls through a wormhole, ending up a couple of hundred million years in the past. They have no electricity, water, and are beset by an array of prehistoric dinosaurs, reptiles, and a particularly horrifying amphibian.
Mitchell has a lot of fun with the period detail. The film revels in its 1980s setting, making sure to show you Walkmans with clunky headphones, Kodak cameras, and characters headed to the library to look up that prehistoric plant that shouldn’t be there, since the internet hasn’t been invented yet. These throwbacks prepare you for the much further throwbacks of pterodactyls, giant tortoises in the road, and nightmares everywhere.
The dinosaurs are rendered with admirably grimy panache—complete with sexual activity and giant piles of poop—in a deliberate contrast with the more streamlined (and higher budget) Jurassic Park films. The 1980s, though, are a little cleaned up. The neighborhood’s notably more integrated than most suburban enclaves were at the time, and no one blinks at a non-white family moving. The past is more toothy, but less racist, and less homophobic, than the 1982 I remember. Or the 2026 I remember.
The deliberate segregation which defined the suburbs in the 1980s is displaced onto the large fanged atavistic others. Colonial fiction, like Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, always frames the colonized as living in a distant past; for Europeans, traveling to the homes of non-white people was figured as a journey into history. In adventure novels like Arthur Conan Doyle’s 1912 The Lost World the British adventurers travel to South America where they encounter “primitive” non-white people and dinosaurs. Dinosaurs are a symbol of the colonized others; they’re the dangerous past, in which all non-Europeans are supposedly mired.
The End of Oak Street channels these old colonial themes despite itself. The suburban enclave, formed by people fleeing from the supposed stereotypical savagery of the urban center, is beset by the others it thought it’d left behind. The only escape is a return to the civilized suburban future. The solution to dinosaurs is white flight—or at least mostly white flight, as the family unit diversifies a bit as it goes on.
The suburban displacement is also, perhaps more intentionally, a metaphor for the disjunction in the Platts’ marriage. As in Die Hard, the threat of career women to marriage causes a kind of psychotic break, throwing the movie into an action/adventure scenario where the guy can prove his manly bona fides against terrorists and/or saurians, as the case may be.
Mitchell does play with the idea of Greg winning his wife back through John McClane heroics—and then undercuts it in what’s undoubtedly the movie’s most shocking moment. That shock is itself erased, though. The suburban 1980s family is ultimately validated—albeit a family in which strong career women, queer relationships, and integration are all treated with more awareness and respect than in Die Hard, Back to the Future, or most of the films of the period.
Addressing the racial and gender politics of the 1980s is a lot to take on for a silly film about fighting dinosaurs. The End of Oak Street arguably does a better job navigating these issues than the more expansive but less canny Stranger Things.
On the one giant claw, Mitchell’s intelligence makes the movie a frustrating experience; if you can see the limits of the 1980s suburban family action/horror genre, why make a movie which stays so firmly within it, only gesturing to the broader world where the streets abruptly end? On that other claw, though, if you’re looking for a fairly smart nostalgia exercise set in the distant, almost forgotten dawn of time, this works well. And it’s even more fun when they get zapped through the wormhole to meet those dinosaurs.