The End of Oak Street review

This is basically Jurassic Park 2 as far as I'm concerned. I know there have already been approximately 47 Jurassic Park movies. I'm skipping over all of those. This is Jurassic Park 2.

A suburban American neighborhood gets ripped out of the present and dumped into a prehistoric world full of dinosaurs. The family at the center of it, led by Anne Hathaway and Ewan McGregor, has to figure out how to stay alive and whether there is any way home.

This is the best dinosaur movie I've seen in quite a while. Anne Hathaway is good. Ewan McGregor is good. They're playing a marriage that was already in trouble before the dinosaurs showed up, which is probably not the ideal time to work through your marital issues.

Hathaway's character is the pragmatist. McGregor's is the optimist. She's already unhappy with their life and their marriage at the beginning, and there's this idea that she wants to leave all of this behind and go pursue her own ambitions. Then suddenly the entire neighborhood is sitting millions of years in the past, and whether you were contemplating moving to New York seems substantially less important.

He believes they'll find a way home. He's religious. Their son shares some of that faith and optimism. Hathaway and the daughter are much more skeptical. I liked that dynamic.

My biggest problem with the movie is actually the neighborhood. Where the hell is everybody?

Your entire American suburban neighborhood has just been transported into dinosaur land, and everybody apparently decides the best survival strategy is to stay in your individual paper house until something with 80 teeth comes through the wall.

Human beings are social animals. That's basically our superpower. We survived things vastly stronger than us because we organize. If Oak Street got transported into the Jurassic period, I promise you by about hour three somebody would have formed a neighborhood association with guns. Somebody's dad would be standing outside saying, "Okay, these six houses cover the north side." There would be food pooling. There would be watches. There would be arguments. There would absolutely be one guy insisting he is now in charge because he owns the largest grill. Something.

Instead, the family barely engages with anybody. The daughter gets one neighbor girl whose primary reason for existing appears to be that the movie needs her to have a love interest. So we're doing the old '80s/'90s coming-of-age trope where the teenager finds romance in the middle of catastrophe, except this time the teenager is a girl and the crush is another girl.

Okay. You changed the gender. The trope is still the trope.

There's nothing wrong with the character. She's just poorly written because the movie barely gives her a reason to exist outside of being the daughter's love interest.

Then there is the obnoxious neighbor, and naturally he receives dinosaur justice. Dinosaurs are extremely judgmental in these movies. You are obnoxious? A dinosaur will find you. That's just how it works.

Despite all of that, I really liked this. It's a good dinosaur movie. It looks good. The family works. The survival stuff works. Hathaway and McGregor work together. The movie understands that seeing normal suburban things suddenly surrounded by prehistoric predators is inherently entertaining.

I'd see it again. That's basically my baseline for whether a movie is good. I'd see this again.