The dinosaurs in The End Of Oak Street demand respect, not affection

While the danger is very much real and constant, it’s not because the dinosaurs of Oak Street are relentless forces of nature. A giant snake is only willing to take so much of Denise Platt’s (Anne Hathaway) frantic stabbing before it slithers away; not because Denise can win, but because she’s not worth the trouble. These dinosaurs—replete with feathers, as modern science now understands them—are simply animals, just appetites and survival drive. And in place of awe, the dinosaurs of The End Of Oak Street demand respect.

This may appear to be a rejection of Steven Spielberg, a decision that speaks to our modern inability to conjure wonder in cinema, the sort of jaded cynicism that the celebrated filmmaker himself pleaded with us to reject in this year’s Disclosure Day. But it’s not, not really. Spielberg and the Amblin era he led has been flattened in our memory, robbed of its edges as a cinema nostalgic for ’80s movies has supplanted the actual cinema of the ’80s in our minds. What’s been lost is its sense of meanness, of real peril, of family films that maybe go a little too far. 

What The End Of Oak Street does reject is a sentimentality that can translate to commerce. It’s hard to imagine kids buying toys modeled after the feathered dinosaurs of Oak Street, not because they are hideous but because Mitchell does little to anthropomorphize them. The camera does not linger on any dinosaur’s eyes, and what we do see there is not expressive. There are no irises, just beady, steady gazes with pinpricks of light reflected in them. They are fuzzy, but you would never pet them. They look like they smell bad. If there is merch for this movie, it will likely be hideous. If there is a sequel, no one will be cheering for the dinosaurs. (It is telling that the movie’s big cheer moment is for a dog!)

Again, this doesn’t make The End Of Oak Street incompatible with what Spielberg did in the Amblin era, it’s just prioritizing its darker undercurrents. Mitchell attempts to underline this in how he juxtaposes his uglier take on dinosaurs with an ugly situation for the Platt family, as Denise and her husband Greg (Ewan McGregor) appear to be on the precipice of divorce, and their kids know it. The film, however, in its propensity for schlock, is unable to give this any real dramatic heft. 

But it’s not misguided that the film goes there. Even in its most mean-spirited moments—every death in the film is bracing in its casual violence, a series of sudden shocks that it’s hard to believe the Platts will ever recover from—The End Of Oak Street is merely giving its own bloody version of Dr. Ian Malcolm’s lecture about the violence of life finding a way. Nature, both Mitchell and Spielberg believe, is red of tooth and claw, and has little use for our sentiment.