The End of Oak Street

Spoilers.

David Robert Mitchell's written and directed 4 features and I've had great-to-profound experiences with each, if you'll allow me to define "great" and "profound" in purely personal, untransferable terms, because that's the only metric we've got. A brief history:
- I rented The Myth of the American Sleepover, his 2010 debut film, in 2014 or 2015, when It Follows was getting hyped up on the festival circuit. I thought it was a special film and then The Magnetic Fields' "The Saddest Story Ever Told," a relative deep cut from their Susan Anway era, played over the end credits and I thought, 'That's it, this is my guy, this is an artist I'll probably love forever."
- I saw It Follows in Redwood City, California in 2015, on the night it hit wide release. A week or two later, I moved to Philadelphia and saw it again there, with my then-girlfriend, now-wife. It was the last and then first theatrical experience I had on either end of a huge life change.
- In 2018, his next film, Under The Silver Lake, premiered at Cannes, and then its American release was pushed back a year and then that release was made extremely limited, skipping everywhere but LA and NYC. The first time I watched Under the Silver Lake, I was high in my home, and in one scene, the film's protagonist was high in his home, and he realized there was a secret message being conveyed through a strategy guide in an old issue of Nintendo Power, and he approached a stack of magazines topped by the Nintendo Power with a Turok cover, and that exact issue was on top of a stack of magazines next to my desk, and I have never felt more weirdly in sync with a movie about being weirdly in sync with things. It was 4D, it was D-Box, it was transcendent. Later in the film, David Yow from The Jesus Lizard showed up and joyfully introduced himself as "The Homeless King."

I saw The End of Oak Street on Friday and it's the weakest of David Robert Mitchell's four movies, but it's still very good. I haven't seen the new Ross McEwlee documentary because it may destroy me, and there're plenty of potentially great things coming before 2027, but as of right now, The End of Oak Street is probably the second-best new film I've seen this year.

It starts horribly. Mitchell opens the story in suburban Michigan, just like Myth and It Follows, though it's possible this is never explicitly mentioned and I assumed the location based on all of the Faygo cans that pop up in the background. Regional soda doesn't get much more regional. It's 1982 and the Platts, a family of four (mom Anne Hathaway, dad Ewan McGregor, daughter Maisy Stella and son Christian Convery), are dealing with money problems. Hathaway's writing a novel but keeps it to herself, McGregor's working side jobs delivering pizza to make ends meet, Stella can't afford to go to Cornell next year, Convery wants to know girls. It's standard stuff.

Going in, my perception was Mitchell had created a Spielberg pastiche, where E.T. gearshifts into Jurassic Park. That's mostly true, though War of the Worlds is as prevalent in Oak Street's DNA as Jurassic Park is. I have seen too many E.T. pastiches. Mitchell doesn't approach the tropes in a novel way, so you're stuck with 20 minutes of "Do you think Mom and Dad are going to get a divorce? And is the town bully going to murder me?" placeholder stuff. It's odd, because the other two Mitchell movies set in Michigan do a terrific job making their teen characters into full humans. You would not think this is where he would slip.

It doesn't help that Ewan McGregor, who I normally like, is doing an erector-set rigid American accent that makes everything he says sound like "Gee, kids, I think it's swell to be your father at this time in the country's history."

Once the dinosaurs come, none of that matters. Until a thrilling peak with a snake dino, every individual minute of The End of Oak Street is better than its predecessor. It's a mediocre family drama and then it's about sheltering from dinosaurs and then it's about running around as dinosaurs attack and as far as tension-building and the way the action's shot and all of that stuff we think of as straddling the line between the artistic and technical parts of the craft go, it's a great film that never stops besting itself.

The last five minutes are just okay and there's a scene where a character gets their picture taken and the second that photo peels out of its Polaroid camera, you know they're going to die, but everything else is exactly what it needs to be.

David Robert Mitchell's involvement was my primary point of interest here, though I was also excited he was working with Anne Hathaway and his regular DP Michael Gioulakis. The dinosaurs were equally a source of interest and concern.

As much as Jurassic Park is a perfect blockbuster, it might be the only good pre-Oak Street dinosaur movie. There have now been seven Jurassic Park/World films and the drop-off in quality between the original and the best of its sequels is steep. That cliff is sheer. If you want to count Godzilla as a dinosaur, there are some more good options. I'll throw down for the 1993 Super Mario Bros. movie, I'll watch and get some small, kitschy enjoyment out of Theodore Rex and Tammy and the T-Rex, and I guess there are dinosaurs in five minutes of The Tree of Life, but thrillers with dinosaurs are a subgenre of the damned.

It makes me wonder about the appeal of dinosaurs as movie bad guys. For me, as far as Jurassic Park and The End of Oak Street are concerned, it's that there are a bunch of them and they're unquestionably lethal. When you watch an entry in the Friday the 13th series, Jason (or his mom) are violent outliers. Leatherface has a fucked up family, but they're still abnormalities in their universe. Victims and potential victims are always trying to appeal to Leatherface's better nature. The horror there is "Can you believe a person could be this vicious?"

Dinosaurs (or sharks, or chimps) are pure impulse, which means a good dinosaur movie isn't going to have a bunch of boring questions about whether the protagonists can reason with them. A bad dinosaur movie will do that, of course– Jurassic Park III, by far the best Park or World after the original, has that embarrassing sequence where Alessandro Nivola gives eggs back to some velociraptors and they kind of nod like 'Hey, thanks for the eggs, man, respect, stay healthy out there" and the Jurassic World trilogy has Blue, an empathy misfire so severe it could only come from the guy who made The Book of Henry. But a good dino movie establishes there are a bunch of races of giant lizard that will either hunt you for food or will kill you because they're giant lizards and don't particularly care if they step on a person or if their tail swings into a car. It's The Texas Chain Saw Massacre if everybody in Texas was a cannibal, or it's Friday the 13th if Camp Crystal Lake's 1:200 machete guy to normal person ratio was flipped.

The "death game" genre plays with this, whether it's Battle Royale or The Purge or The Running Man: a person has to run around a contained space as other people try to get them. The Saw films are sports movies in that you watch them and try to puzzle out which of the people you're rooting for is going to win. Who's got natural advantages, who's the underdog? A good dino thriller is that, but one team is unquestionably faster and stronger than the other, so it's not "Who's more capable, Person A or Person B?" but "Under what circumstances could Person A escape from Dinosaur A?" The advantages are so clear it'd be insulting if a movie went out of its way to explain how much worse a person would be at hunting dinos than a building-sized T-Rex would be at hunting people.

There are no Blues or Denver the Last Dinosaurs in The End of Oak Street. There's no question that, unless the people we're watching can escape through a magic portal, they will be killed by dinosaurs. The human characters are never going to properly adapt to this world. Their chances of survival are going to keep going down until the movie ends.

One thing I really liked in The End of Oak Street were the little glimpses of how other people are making out. A bunch of folks in this displaced neighborhood are killed in the initial confusion, one delusional neighbor tries to shoot a pterodactyl flock with a revolver, and then there's a lot of silence from the outside world's human population. We'll see a car drive by, a couple kids will temporarily emerge from the darkness and then scurry back into hiding, but everybody's panicked. It's not like so many disaster movies, where the characters are in search of a mythological safe place. The one addition to the Platt family, Jeanette (Jordan Alexa Davis), joins up with them because they're the closest thing to safety she's going to find, but they're nowhere close to 'safe.' There is no cavalry, there's just the most secure hole these characters can huddle in, and occasionally David Robert Mitchell shows us other people scrambling to find new shelter if those people get physically near the ones we're locked in on. It makes the world feel bigger, while also showing us nobody's any better equipped for Dinosaur Apocalypse than the Platts are, which also makes it feel more frightening. It's not as if Anne, Ewan and the gang can find a special bunker where the town survivalist is loading rifles and cooking non-perishable food. Everybody's flailing.

The storytelling problems in the first act mostly vanish as the dinosaur threat gets worse because all of the conflicts that were set up pre-dino either no longer matter or get resolved in passing. No fretting about college tuition when your dad died screaming in a T-Rex's jaws.

The most Spielbergian touch is that the dad's story doesn't end with that death. When I said The End of Oak Street takes a lot from The War of the Worlds, I meant in the flailing, the running from giant things none of us are prepared to counter. Of course, that movie ends with Tom Cruise's son, who had previously run headfirst into flaming death, showing up unharmed at Grandma's place. I don't sit around putting serious thought toward the end of The War of the Worlds, but my feelings on that bit do fluctuate. When The End of Oak Street kills Ewan McGregor, there's no ambiguity, and then it needs to use portals and time travel to deus ex machina him back to life. I would completely understand a person feeling that character resurrection was as cheap as the one in The War of the Worlds. I'm fine with it. I don't want anybody to die, even fake people in J.J. Abrams-produced popcorn movies. I'm a little too raw right now to reject schmaltz. The movie is better for it's PG-13 "And everybody was happy" ending. I hope the script also notes that they're all now invincible and none of them have to worry about money ever again.