by Alice-Ginevra Micheli, Contributing Writer
August is a funny time for movies, and that can definitely be said with this year’s lineup. After some major tentpoles made themselves known in July, it wouldn’t be against reason to consider this August’s slate to be the films that Hollywood forgot. None more so than this surprisingly star-studded monster movie, which has a nostalgically strange premise, has undergone a name change, and promises a family-friendly-ish adventure.
The End of Oak St, previously known as Flowervale Street follows your typical nuclear family in 1980s America. Attending block parties, managing life with kids, a dog, and keeping their personal drama hidden away from prying eyes, everything seems to be a-okay for them. However, when a freak cosmic event transports their suburbia into a prehistoric jungle nightmare, they must come together in order to escape with their lives.
This whole movie seems to be based on living within the concept of nostalgia. Ironically not in the usual way, with it simply being a reboot or remake of a previous property. The point is very much in the overall excitement of the plot: a regular family suddenly has to fight dinosaurs! How exciting! In fact, this entire film could be summed up with those couple of phrases alone, as with many quasi-family adventure films from 40 years ago. However, with modern audiences wanting a little more substance from their narratives, especially ones that have attracted such a cast, the simplicity of this could in fact be a curse.
Anne Hathaway and Ewan McGregor deliver satisfying enough turns as a begrudged provincial couple who are clearly falling out of love and apparently need several near brushes with death to add some spice back into their marriage. That’s pretty much the extent of it. This can also be said of the bored almost college-age daughter, or the oft-ignored younger brother. They are living, breathing archetypes, and that’s all the movie is interested in delivering. There is very little development, or depth given to any character, so if that’s something that people don’t care about, particularly in a monster movie, then there will still be plenty of enjoyment to be had here.
That’s the thing with this film, it delivers exactly what it promises: no more, and no less. It watches a family spend the majority of its runtime literally running away from big dinosaurs that want to eat them. There is a very loose idea as to how they’ve ended up in this situation, and how they could possibly get out of it, but really the bulk lies in the action set pieces. All of this feels not only inspired by movies of the 80s, but almost directly ripped from the time, one where the excitement of it all was the point.
Some would say that as this is what the film achieves, then doesn’t that mean that it successfully delivered on its promise? It’s a silly little movie about a silly little family that fights silly big dinosaurs. Sure, and if that’s all one wants out of a 90-minute viewing experience, then this might very well be one of the most enjoyable experiences of the year. However, unlike the filmgoers of 40 years ago, it’s possible that because every form of monster movie, especially one containing dinosaurs, has already been done, then it might be more prudent to deliver something with any form of interesting take – modern or otherwise.
It goes to show how shallow this movie even was, by the fact that the majority of this review was spent talking about its relation to nostalgia, and not on the film itself. There simply isn’t much to talk about. The characters are two-dimensional, if that, the story flimsier than a sheet of tissue paper, and the action a lot of ‘been there, done that.’ The End of Oak Street is unlikely to inspire many ardent fans, or even ardent memories in tepid fans. It’s fine, this movie is fine, and that’s all it’s ever going to be.
Rating: Just Okay
The End of Oak Street is currently in theaters.
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