Culture
Now Playing: ‘The End of Oak Street’ is a satisfying suburban monster movie
By: Gordon Briggs
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You’re walking down the street of a normal-looking neighborhood.
You see manicured lawns, white picket fences, and kids riding bicycles when suddenly something incredible appears before you: a very large and very hungry dinosaur.
Now your normal suburban location becomes a battlefield against prehistoric monsters.
That mix of the ordinary and extraordinary is what makes The End of Oak Street so appealing as entertainment.
This is a movie that gives us classic ’80s-era monster thrills while simultaneously subverting our nostalgia for a once better past.
One of the strongest aspects of this movie is the suburban setting. Part of the fun of Oak Street is the way it contrasts the ordinary and the extraordinary. Specifically, by replacing this highly controlled environment of an ’80s neighborhood with an ancient, untamed jungle, the film creates a striking visual contrast of familiar everyday places with a strange, terrifying sense of the unknown. The contrast is driven home by strange visual imagery, such as a dinosaur digging through suburban trash cans or a prehistoric snake slithering past an above-ground swimming pool.
Of course, all the monsters in the world don’t mean anything if you don’t care about the characters they’re endangering. Thankfully, Oak Street does an effective job of making us care about the Pratt family.
A different movie would have made this family quirky and funny. However, the family here is not quirky; they are profoundly alienated and trapped by economic and marital strife. I specifically want to praise Anne Hathaway’s performance as the mother. I appreciate how her character is alienated and unhappy with her family life, only for her fierce survival instincts to kick in immediately when monsters appear. She anchors the film as a protective mother willing to do anything to keep her family alive.
Even when things get serious, the movie still has a wicked sense of humor, particularly regarding nostalgia for the ’80s. On the surface, the movie feels like it’s made to cash in on nostalgia for ’80s Spielberg-esque movies.
When the film starts, it does seem to play into our desire to go back to a “simpler time”. However, when dinosaurs come crashing through the neighborhood, we see how the film distorts that cultural desire to go back in time. The dinosaur attacks don’t magically unite them in a feel-good way; they push them into a darker place where their survival instincts expose their alienation from one another.
In the end, those who were disappointed by the Jurassic World movies should be entertained by this dinosaur movie, which is not only thrilling but also offers nuggets of wisdom about how we may have idealized our past. ★ ★ ★ 1/2