The End Of Oak Street

A mysterious cosmic event sends a quiet suburban neighborhood hundreds of millions of years into the past, where they soon discovers that Oak Street is not the place they once knew, and if they want to survive the hungry dinosaurs outside their door, they will need to stick together.

I love this idea.

The story of a 1980s suburban neighborhood that is suddenly dropped in the middle of the Time of the Dinosaurs? I love it. This kind of thing is right up my alley, as I'm a big fan of Portal Fantasy.

A sci-fi/fantasy subgenre, the whole idea behind Portal Fantasy is that the story hinges on a plot device where the characters ends up in a new world of some kind–the past, the future, an alien planet, an alternate reality, whatever–and they do this via a portal, hence the name. The portals could be anything. A weird door, a weird ring of mushrooms, a weird wormhole in space, a weird cave, a weird cupboard, a weird tornado, a weird flash of light, anything weird, really.

And once the characters are there in this new world, there's usually some kind of quest that needs to be undertaken, one that will take them all across this strange new land, if they wish to ever return home, which for some inexplicable reason, they always seem to want to do. "I need to get home! My Visa bill is due! Who will make my car payment? What am I supposed to do here in this fantasy land… hang out all day in my sentient floating castle, with my sarcastic talking lute, a bumbling half elk-half man wizard, a loyal and devoted robot knight who doesn’t understand metaphors, and a tough half-naked elf maiden who loves me, while eating a fantasy version of Turkish Delight that’s actually tasty, and a frankly disconcerting amount of venison and roasted boar? And mead? So much god damn mead! Those TPS reports are not going to file themselves, y’know!"

What I’m saying is, as far as fictional set-ups go, the portal to a new world is a fairly common one. The Wizard of Oz. John Carter of Mars. The Dark Tower. The Chronicles of Narnia. Jumanji. The Magicians. Farscape. Sliders. Stargate SG-1 even. And of course, my childhood favorite, Voyagers.

Amongst many others…

In fact, my own WIP, still trudging its way through a world-building quagmire as a result of an admittedly somewhat questionable narrative choice in the second act of the story, is also a portal fantasy tale.

So yeah, I'm in for all those reasons.

I'm also in, because I'm particularly interested in this specific version of Portal Fantasy. I like the whole "time travelers stranded in the time of dinosaurs" idea. The Odyssey of Flight 33, about a commercial airliner in ’39 that finds itself flying high above prehistoric times, is a Twilight Zone episode I've never forgotten. As a kid, I was obsessed with the tv show The Land of the Lost, and the adventures of Marshall, Will, and Holly, who, while on a routine expedition, end up… well, you can probably guess from the title. I really wanted to like 65 too, that Adam Driver movie about an ancient astronaut who crash-lands on a prehistoric Earth? I really wanted too. I watched Terra Nova when it was on—that show about the people from a dystopian, overpopulated, and hyper-polluted future who enter a time rift to establish a colony 85 million years in the past—in the hopes that it would be fun (it wasn't). I even tried to watch La Brea, the show about modern day people who fall through a sinkhole by the La Brea Tar Pits, and end up in some Hollow Earth dinosaur land. (That one was particularly awful.)

I’m simply always willing to give this idea a shot.

Most of all, I'm in because what I really want is a Lost meets Twilight Zone meets La Brea/Terra Nova/The Odyssey of Flight 33 type of survival-adventure story. But, y'know... a good version of that. I want something like From, but instead of going to a Stephen King's Greatest Hits pocket universe, they go to dinosaur times (and the dinosaurs have fur and feathers, of course). Also... maybe it's dinosaur times, but it’s a Jack Kirby-inspired He-Man/Atlantis type world too, with dino-riding warriors, a primordial age lost to time, a time of super science and sorcery, and it's also the twilight of that Age, so it’s greatest works are faded and falling into ruin, and the snows are coming, as the great mountains begin to rumble and shake and smoke, and there's rumors of evil strangers in the north, burning and reaving as they go, and so, as the newcomers step into this strange and dangerous world, the scent of war hangs heavy in the air...?

So you’re probably saying, “sounds like you’ve got a vision, why don’t you write it yourself, Jon?” To that I’d answer… I’d like to, but as I said above, I’m currently slogging through a narrative swamp in my WIP, and I’m somewhere in the middle of nowhere, no end in sight, knee-deep in mud, soaked to the bone, weeds clinging to me as I slap away the swarms of tiny biting insects, and I simply refuse to relent. I refuse to be distracted by shiny new ideas. I may end up paving over this swamp at some point in the future, maybe even nuking it completely out of existence, but for now, this is what I’m doing, and I‘m going to conquer it. I walked into this swamp, I am going to walk out the other side.

But I digress...

My point is, what I want to see here is the smart people teaming up, looting the houses of the dead idiots, pooling their resources, finding the strongest building to hole up in and reinforce, and then... then they begin to conquer Dino-land!

Maybe some of them even ride a T. Rex at some point!

I'm probably not going to get this here, I understand that. Still, I continue to dare to dream. I continue to hope that perhaps someday, maybe... ah, forget it. Again, I digress. What I’m saying is, I'm excited to check this out, even if it is yet another somewhat obvious riff on the Spielberg/Amblin style of the 80s, an aesthetic that has started to become a bit of a red flag with modern day movies… especially when it's from Bad Robot productions, which this film is.

Bad Robot is JJ Abrams' studio. JJ Abrams is the man who responsible for fumbling the easiest lay-up in modern cinematic history, and in doing so, so egregiously and irrevocably broke a beloved and seemingly unassailable franchise so thoroughly, that despite the Herculean efforts of many others, it may be permanently tapped-out forever, barring the occasional postmortem twitch or two, so… I’m going into this film somewhat warily.

Also, just as an aside, I'm kind of surprised that this isn't a Cloverfield movie.

The Cloverfield movies are an American science fiction anthology film series headed up by Abrams and Bad Robot. Some claim the series's title is related to an as-of-yet unrevealed sci-fi idea, but it's actually because the Bad Robot production office is located on/near Cloverfield Boulevard in Santa Monica. It was chosen randomly, because at the time, Abrams was deep in his "mystery box" phase, and he wanted to increase the buzz about what would become the first film in the anthology, Cloverfield, a POV film about a kaiju attack on New York. The name stuck around for the other films: 10 Cloverfield Lane, the story of a young woman who wakes up to find she's trapped in a bunker with a man who claims there's an alien invasion happening outside, and The Cloverfield Paradox, about a group of astronauts on a space station who witness the Earth seemingly vanish. Apparently there's an unknown new film in the anthology on the way too. Obviously, it's a very hodge-podge anthology, especially because, other than the Cloverfield name itself, these moves are otherwise completely unrelated.

There were rumors that the Kristin Stewart movie, Underwater, about a group of workers at a drilling facility at the bottom of the ocean who are attacked by strange creatures, was maybe supposed to be a part of the Cloverfield anthology. Overlord, a film about American soldiers dropped behind enemy lines the day before D-Day, who then discover horrific Nazi experiments, was also said to have almost become one of the Cloverfield films. The Quiet Place, a movie about a family that is trying to survive in a post-apocalyptic world inhabited by blind extraterrestrial creatures with an acute sense of hearing, that went on to span multiple sequels itself, was another film that was said to have almost been part of the Cloverfield anthology.

So, when you look at all those different films, the ones that actually are a part of the Cloverfield anthology, and those that are not, it's pretty easy to see that, in true JJ Abrams fashion, there’s really no rhyme or reason to any of it. Which is not that surprising, because if there’s one thing you can say for JJ Abrams, it’s he’s great at casting his films. And if you were going to say a second thing? The meat of a story is never as important to him as the vibes are, something he proved in his Star Wars sequels. It’s this exact kind of vibes-based, otherwise seemingly arbitrary decision-making style that makes it so weird this film isn't part of the Cloverfield anthology. The anthology IP belongs to him. The film is from his production house. The story has the same one-off, sci-fi based feeling as the others. Cloverfield: The End of Oak Street might have been too much title, sure, but you still could've called it: The End of Cloverfield Lane or something, right? There’s basically no hurdles here to tie this film in with the other films, which would only increase their intake of money, either at the Box Office, or in their back catalog. Not that it matters, of course, it’s just kind of noticeably weird is what I’m saying.

Whatever. I’ve rambled on for long enough.

Let's get to it.

Michigan. 1982.

There's a summer block party in full swing, and it’s filled with good people, real salt o’ the earth types, all gathered on a nice, safely homogeneous suburban cul-de-sac. Just another pleasant valley Sunday, right? Charcoal burning everywhere, and rows of houses that are all the same, but no one seems to care.

But below the surface, there’s… issues.

It's family drama Americana, here in status symbol land.

Money is tight. The auto industry is dying, thanks to Reagan, so Dad’s is now working part-time as a pizza guy. Meanwhile, Mom is an ever-smiling portrait of quiet desperation. As a result, they just aren't communicating, not like they used to. Dad avoids the subject, but otherwise is so serene, he’s got a tv in every room. Mom hides in the basement and writes thinly-veiled divorce fanfic about how hard life is, but the kids just don’t seem to understand. But that's because Junior is now an irresponsible teenager, who takes very poor care of his dog, but in their defense, they’re both untrained dumb animals due to benign family neglect. Sissy is a good girl, meanwhile, she’s reliably responsible, but she’s also got her head in the clouds a little. Sissy has big dreams and an even bigger crush on the boy across the street. Meanwhile, radio says there’s weird ripples in space, and an unusual amount of solar flares too, but again, it doesn’t seem to affect their world, so… not their problem, right? Who cares.

That night, there’s weird lights.

The following day, Denise photographs a mysterious plant that has suddenly appeared in her neighbor's backyard overnight. The local librarian says the weird plant looks like a species that’s been extinct for 200 million years. Later we find out that, since librarians are keepers of ancient wisdom and mystical secrets, she quite naturally lives in a giant creepy rambling gothic mansion atop the highest hill in the neighborhood.

This doesn’t have anything to do with the story really, it just… odd.

That night, as Dad snores on the living room couch with the tv playing quietly, Mom diligently types out her barbaric yawp in the basement, Sissy gazes up at the stars and vaguely yearns, and Junior masturbates under a blanket… a strange wind kicks up, a bright light flashes, and a swelling orchestral score indicates to us, John Williams-style, that some wonder and magic is happening.

The next morning there’s a giant pile of shit in the middle of a different neighbor’s backyard. It's a truly giant pile too. Giant. Like almost as tall as a man.

The next night, as it storms wildly, the bright lights and the weird winds return, and this time, it culminates in a huge flash of light, and then a pop. The rain stops. There’s a sudden change in pressure. Everything goes quiet. Everything goes dark too. The power is out.

The next morning, it’s hot and muggy, and the dog is missing. The rope that ties it to its doghouse ends in tatters. Not only is the power still out, the water is too, and in the distance there’s strange animal sounds, and maybe some screams. Mom and Dad, somewhat concerned, tell the kids to stay inside while they go out to look for the dog. In the reality, they know something is off, but don’t know what. What they eventually find is that a big circle of Oak Street, their whole neighborhood, is now sitting in the middle of a steaming swamp, like it was neatly cut out, lifted up, and then set down in a seemingly prehistoric landscape, and also… there are dinosaurs emerging from the swamp, and they are eating the neighbors.

It’s about this time that a dinosaur notices Mom and Dad...

Time to run!

This is basically what the rest of the movie about.

When the family isn't huddled in the boarded-up confines of the family home, dealing with their familial issues, muffled gunfire and screams in the distance, while eating a frankly weird amount of milk and cereal, they're running through suburban lawns with dinosaurs hot on their asses.

They're not having a good time.

Meanwhile, the dinosaurs are having a blast. For the dinosaurs, this patch of suburbs is basically Christmas in July with an all-you-can-eat buffet. They're just estatic to find this place absolutely packed with all these slow, dumb, and easy-to-catch animals. I mean, for real, people... once you know you’re in dinosaur times, why would you need to go and “check” what that loud roar was?

It’s a fucking dinosaur, man… Don’t go over there.

David Robert Mitchell wrote and directed this.

He's known for the films “It Follows” and “Under the Silver Lake," two films I really liked, so I'm a little hard-pressed to understand what this film is. It feels so much different from his previous films. Style. Content. Tone. Intent. From the kind of film that this is, from the way that it just doesn’t quite work overall, from what it feels like it’s trying to say, from the way that there is clearly an attempt in this film to subvert expectations, an attempt that the rest of the production doesn't seem to be in line with, I would’ve guessed that this was simply a work for hire. If that was the case, then I wouldn’t blame him for trying to make something more out of the average studio slush-pile slough-off trash.

But then I see that he didn’t just direct it, he wrote it. And also, he didn’t adapt it from an existing piece of media. He didn’t rewrite someone one else’s script.

He wrote it wrote it.

In fact, The End Of Oak Street has long been a passion project of Mitchell’s, one that's taken him years to get up on the screen, one that's rooted in a childhood love of dinosaurs that he and his father bonded over. The more you read about that, the more it becomes clear that this film, all the dinosaurs and time travel madness of it aside, for all intents and purposes, is an autobiographical story of him, his father, and his family growing up. Okay, fine. Great. I can get with that.

Unfortunately, this is the key to one of the film’s two chief problem.

Because while you can definitely see the hints of this idea in the film, the idea that within this tale of dinosaurs-adventures, this is actually the story of a young man trying to connect with a father that he lived with, but clearly didn’t really know, is just not true. This is because, like so much else in the movie, at best, this idea, the whole metaphor, is only kind of brought up, peripherally, and perhaps then briefly held up to the light, but after that, it’s just tossed aside and forgotten. That’s it. It’s certainly not explored very deeply.

In fact, it’s fair to say that, outside of being a family that basically cares about each other, nothing about the arcs concerning their fractured relationships depends on, or is repaired by, the events of this movie. Not literally and not metaphorically. In fact, calling these supposed themes “shallowly engaged” by this story feels like I’m being overly generous. My point here is, regardless of whatever the filmmaker may claim or imply, in the end, one thing that you certainly would not say about this film, is that it's a movie about the bonds between fathers and sons.

Some might respond with, well... it’s supposed to be an action movie, right? Action movies are never all that emotionally deep, right?

To that, I’d say…you obviously haven't seen this movie.

There’s an extended sequence partway through this film that is set to the song Valerie by Steve Winwood, as well as a late night encounter with a bully late in the movie, that best illustrates what this movie actually wants to focus one, which just so happens to also be its second chief issue. And that is that this film truly believes the interpersonal struggles of the average 1980s Boomer/Gen X nuclear suburban American family is much more interesting than the question of how that family might survive in Dinosaur times, with only the cheap plastic garbage resources of 1980s America.

And that is just… wholly incorrect.

Nobody went to this movie to see family issues. They went to see suburban dinosaur attacks, and while the film does that, it's clearly a secondary priority. And when you’re talking about a movie that clocks in at less than a 100 minutes, where it’s a half hour or so before the first Dinosaur even appears, and all while it fails to make much hay out what is clearly its mainly priority (the family issues), the worst part is… this is all an unavoidable issue.

But is it all potentially interesting? Sure. But if it's not actually saying anything, then potentially interesting is all it’s got. There‘s definitely no attempt to draw a line between the actual reality of dinosaurs and the metaphorical dinosaur that is the idea of the idyllic life of the nuclear family in the American suburbs. There's certainly no attempt at any kind of commentary about the actual historical fate of one and the impending fate of the other in modern day America. There’s… nothing. And if this truly is what you are attempting to do as a filmmaker, if you're trying to mirror the dissolution of the myth of the “good” (white) American family, all while highlighting the festering rot of the American suburbs, as well as the false illusion of safety that they provide, not to mention the completely irrational fear that their creation was based upon, by using the metaphor of ravenous monsters coming out of… ahem… the jungle, then you should follow through on that. You should go all the way. At the very least, you need to actually say something, because the attempt at some Spielbergian action scenes is just not delivering the goods. I’m sure some people will say “well, this is supposed to be about how regular people would react.” But to that I’d answer… who gives a fuck how “regular” people would react? Who wants to see that? This is a fucking movie, for god’s sake.

But to be fair (although I'm not convinced that it wasn't unintentional), the film actually does do a really great job illustrating one always reliable truth…

The suburbs don't know shit about community.

I mean, the characters barely spare a single thought for their neighbors. They check on a total of one neighbor, but that’s before they even know what’s actually going on, and they certainly don’t try to help anyone during the dinosaur attacks. Sure, the next door neighbor is an asshole, but come on… team up, people. Sissy doesn’t even use it as an opportunity to get close to her crush. That kid may as well have not even been in the movie for as much as the storyline involving him actually mattered. Their neighbors don't give a shit about them either. Everybody is behind their own locked doors, focused solely on saving themselves, and just not giving two fucks about the screams and gunshots from down the street.

Not a single knock at the door.

And you’d think… oh, here’s some fertile metaphorical grounds, right? Nope. There’s nothing about this. I have to wonder if it even occurred Mitchell at all. The only time they actually save a neighbor is at the end, when they figure out the way home. The family then brings a recently orphaned, new to the neighborhood, Black girl along. But it soon becomes the clear that the only reason the story did that is so she could be the first to jump into the weird wormhole, to answer the question of whether or not jumping into the weird wormhole kills you, so none of the family have to potentially sacrifice themselves. I mean, the story doesn’t specifically say this out loud, but yeah, thats why the story includes her, which is...

Yikes, right?

And when this is after the only asian lady sacrifices herself, allowing a bunch of dinosaur alligators to devour her alive, as a distraction, in order for the nice white family to live... that’s an extra yikes.

But to be honest, I don’t think Mitchell notices this either, and if he does, he doesn't bother making any hay out of any of it as well. Once again, it’s a big ball of nothing. By the end, as the film is pulling off a series of last minute saves in what is a frankly unbelievable amount of time, I can’t say what this film is even trying to impart to us. It’s just… empty. I don’t know if Mitchell lost control, if he bit off more than he could chew and it all fell apart, or if he just wasn’t capable of this kind of project from the start, but this whole film is a big ball of nothing.

Which is too bad. I wish it had been more fun.

Also, I wanted to add that I was not a fan of the way the film constantly went out of its way to remind us that the dogs and cats are in danger.

On top of that, the weird, out of nowhere, thankfully brief inclusion of God/Bible talk was an odd, ultimately pointless couple of moments. It was a small thing, sure, but again, it illustrates the main question of this film: “Why are you wasting what little time you have on this thing that goes nowhere?”

Finally, and I know this is a nitpick, and it’s probably just a me thing, but the way they’re constantly drinking milk in this film grosses me out. Sure, part of it is how milk has become this white supremacist dog whistle (seriously), and part of it is because it reminds me of all those anti-vaxxer/raw milk lunatic assholes, and as a result, the whole idea of milk kinda grosses me out now, but it’s also the taste, and the consistency, the smell of it, even the sound of the word itself…

Milk.

Say it. Say it out loud, let the push of the “mil” linger on your lips for a moment before cutting it off abruptly with the hard cough of the “k" at the end. Do it. Say it. Say it slow and out loud. Say it at someone.

Milk.

It sounds terrible. It sounds thick and mucousy and moldy and slightly opaline.

Gross.

Anyway… All that having been said, for me, the most unbelievable part of this entire movie, this story about a chunk of suburban Michigan ending up in dinosaur times, was Ewan MacGreggor’s bad portrayal of a pizza man, as he nonchalantly turns the pizza box on its side multiple times.

Fucking fake bullshit, man.

That said, I do feel pretty bad for Mom losing the only copy of her manuscript as a result of all this Time Travel/Dinosaur nonsense. That really sucks, dude. But hey, the same thing happened to Hemingway… well, not the same thing same thing, but he did lose a suitcase of manuscripts that he was never able to reproduce, so yeah… that’s sucks, but all you can do is start over. Plus, I did like that at least this movie had some actual sex in it for once. It was dinosaur sex, sure, but they were really giving it to each other, so good for them.

Anyway, there's a couple of surprises here, but not really. Despite the fun subject matter, The End Of Oak Street is just not a good movie, any way you slice it.

I really wish it had been better.