It was with some trepidation that I watched The End of Oak Street (2026). Yet another movie with dinosaurs, and yet another movie about ‘suburbia’. I wasn’t a particular big fan of the director either, David Robert Mitchell, the guy who did It Follows (2014). Not to mention the producer J. J. Abrams. The only thing that carried me through was the star cast – Anne Hathaway and Ewan McGregor. If they’re in it, it can’t be 'that' bad. And even if it is, they’d be the best thing in it. Well, they are the best thing in the movie, but that said, the film is actually quite good and has some great surprises.

By Emad Aysha
The story's setting is strange. An idyllic neighbourhood, true enough, but set in 1982 for some reason. You have a family barbecue with everyone invited, and straight away you can feel some tension in the air. The lady of the house, Denise Platt (Hathaway), is an aspiring novelist, but her husband, Greg, has ‘deliveries’ to make.

Ewan McGregor plays a glorified pizza boy here and the ‘disappointment’ is evident in Hathaway’s illustrious, deep brown, Elfin eyes. (She’s ravishing here, with perfect skin and legs that go on forever.) The other aspiring individual in the brood is the daughter Audrey (Maisy Stella), who is a fan of Carl Sagan’s Cosmos TV series.

The son is Brian (Christian Convery), the usual youngster with water in his head, trying to be a man with a bow and arrow and obsessing over his lacklustre dog, Starbuck. (That name sounds like a double pun, on the cosmic event that will catapult them into the past and the present-day Starbucks coffee chain.)

PICTURE PERFECT: Christian Convery, Anne Hathaway and Maisy Stella, lost in a lonely cosmos of their own making. Bet there's still time to save the man of the house!

A new wealthy family have moved in next door; they’re Catholics and send their daughter to a private school where they have ‘prayers’. Brian is also smoking behind the scenes while Denise secretly wants to split from the whole family scene.

It’s in her unpublished novel, which she writes in secret in the basement—the movie reeks of retrospective feminism. Denise is also the assertive one, while her husband is the big peacemaker. Even the soundtrack has a retro feel.

Denise’s best friend is an old lady who edits her drafts, a woman who never got that kind of attention from her husband of 30 years with all his editorial 'demands'.

I suppose the choice of 1980s suburbia is deliberate for this reason, highlighting the transition period in American history when equality began to take hold. The end of Oak Street seems to be a double reference, again, hinting at a closed-off world that also comes to an end (with its problems) when the movie is over.

They also have an obnoxious neighbour who wears horn-rimmed glasses that make him look like a throwback to the 1950s. And he’s angry at their dog for shitting and digging in his backyard. And he’s armed to the teeth.

Then the ‘big’ event occurs: a bright light at night. Everything stops working, even the clocks.

People ignore it all and go with their daily routine, only to find the neighbourhood overrun with large carnivorous birds on the prowl. When the Platts try to escape in their car, they find the whole damn neighbourhood has been zapped backwards in time to the era of when dinosaurs began to grow feathers.

That’s when the tension snaps between Denise and Greg, and he confesses he lost his regular job; he also does a little drinking behind the scenes. But he has his own points of recrimination, knowing about her novel and desire to dump them in favour of self-actualisation.

DEAD-END DREAMS: Suburbia clearly isn't for everybody. Don't you just love it when science fiction turns emotional cutoffs into tangible realities?

The 1980s were paradoxically the era of downsizing and suburban self-indulgence. Luckily, the animal onslaught forces them back together again. One of the coolest scenes has them inside a car, being overrun by a stampede of smaller dinosaurs, and they hug each other and find each other again.

You’ll notice the basement floods during environmental changes. (Hint, hint!) The omnipresence of guns does not bode well either in this ‘street’.

Another cool scene has them taking a polaroid of two giant dinosaurs ‘humping’. It just goes to show that no matter how bad things are, you need to enjoy a good moment, and never let the struggle for survival stop you getting it on in the caddy shack.

They actually learn something from the dinosaurs, believe it or not. There are also allusions to our modern world, with Brian going through an old dinosaur school book that mentions climate change.

The emotional high point is when Greg saves Denise from a marauding predator, I think an Allosaurus, only to get mauled to death in the process. You hate Anne Hathaway’s character at that point, but your gut tells you everything is going to be alright, and he’ll come back in the end.

I won’t tell you how the story ends since it is really wholesome and scientific. I won’t say the movie is perfect, but it carries you through to its conclusion, and the buildup of tension and stakes is phenomenal.

The acting is good, if not great, apart from Hathaway, whose busybody antics are a distraction. The slow build and reveal concerning the dinosaurs is a bonus in this world of excess special effects and overpacing. The soundtrack also ramps up the tension and tragedy as needed.

The special effects are good, but honestly not of the same calibre as the Jurassic Park and World series, and some of the creatures here are clearly taken from those series.

Having feather-covered beasts also doesn’t sit well with the 1980s since people didn’t know that about dinosaurs at the time. The suburbanites should have been freaked out at the scientific accuracy.

BACKSEAT DAD: You can guess why Ewan McGregor is not in the driver's seat in this family. Still, you never know the worth of something till you lose it!

Still, the movie has its heart in the right place, and you discover at the end that the title is actually Denise’s new novel, with them all living up to their aspirations and still sticking together.

All’s well that eventually ends well!