(Just my way of being cute, thesaurus version of the title of the movie.)
I went to see The End of Oak Street today, Sunday opening weekend. I’m not a paid reviewer, so I don’t go opening hours; I go when I find it will be best for my schedule.
I sat down, sat through a few of the previews—there are far too many these days—but then it started with the director’s name, David Robert Mitchell, and I will be honest I looked up some of the other things that he’s done and I didn’t like most of them so I went in after this a little guarded.
Anyway, Anne Hathaway is our female lead. Ewan McGregor is the male lead, her husband, and they are shown to have a tense marriage. He is taking gig work during a neighborhood party when he’s supposed to be spending time with the family. There’s a reasoning for that from his point of view, but he’s not telling her what that is, so that’s part of the tension in the marriage. She is in the basement most nights writing a novel. She just calls it a story, but a neighbor who happens to have edited her own husband’s books for thirty years—as pointed out in the text—loves it and sees the parallels between her and the writer, the character and the writer. And she just says, ‘No, it’s just a story, it’s just a story,’ very defensively. But there is imagery in the book about a constantly packed suitcase, and she is ready to leave her family any day now, type of thing from the book, and that comes up later.
There is a teenage boy, played by Christian Convery, and his dog, and he is, of course, acting out because of the tenseness between the mother and father. There is also an older sister to this boy, played by Maisy Stella, who is very intelligent, has read a lot of Carl Sagan’s books, including Cosmos, so she’s going to be the brain reserve, you can tell that right from that.
And then stuff happens: flashing lights, weird stuff. It is something that is definitely handwaved, but basically, wormholes are opening up and it swallowed this entire neighborhood and transported it to, I guess, the Mesozoic era. Because despite everything you’ve been told about Jurassic Park, none of the dinosaurs in those movies were from that era; they were more likely from the Cretaceous era. But anyway, I think these are Mesozoic, funnily enough—or no, “funnily” is not the right word. This director is listening very carefully to his science advisors and the current belief that dinosaurs are feather-covered instead of just bald lizard-skinned, because they have the same dinosaurs as that other franchise, but they have feathers or hair-like feathers on some of them, and that’s pretty fascinating to look at, to be honest.
It’s a tense little thriller where they’re running away from things, they’re dodging things, they’re watching their neighbor get eaten by the flying things. All of that was really well done. The CGI was solid, and the drama behind it all was well written. They are boarded up in their house, tearing down cabinets to board up windows because, of course, glass is easy to get through from all these lizard beings. He is relentlessly optimistic, which makes her mad. He points out that he’s read her novel, and so that is another source of resentment—now he was keeping that secret as well. Turns out he has lost his job, and so he was just doing gig work to keep money going; that’s why he left during the party. It turns out well, anyway.
Then the young boy finally sees his dog, and the dog runs off because he’s being chased. He goes tracking after it. He has a very ineffective recurve bow that he… it’s kind of hilarious. It’s kind of led to think that that is going to be useful, but of course it is not. He’s like a fourteen-year-old, and it’s a recurve bow—it has no power against the skin of these things. But still, he is still being a man at fourteen, and it’s kind of great. He looks for his dog.
There is a sub-thing, a sub-story, another teenager is holding a grudge against our main young boy hero, and catches him and beat him up a little bit. It’s not really a big story, but it leads to one of the funniest lines. He is lying there all beat up, and his sister finds him and she just says, “What happened to you? Your face looks like a pepperoni pizza,” and I chuckled.
The parents are also looking for the kids, and it’s very much a lived-in neighborhood feel. They aren’t looking aimlessly; they are in the neighborhood they’ve lived in for several years, so of course they would go to where they think things are. They know the pathways through this way, through that way; that all felt very real.
And then chaos ensues, they get chased, there’s just lots of action going on, and stakes are real: a neighbor dies, they see other people die, there are a lot of dead bodies on the ground in various scenes. And then the husband dies—his leg is chopped off, and he has died. But because these are wormholes, which transport people through time and space a little bit, they managed to rescue him before he goes through. So it’s high stakes with no stakes ending, which is hilarious.
And if you look at that final scene on the back patio, you will see something truly fun: one of the girls had to go back and rescue her parents, and she rescued herself, so there are two of them. Trust me, it is the height of verisimilitude. I loved it.
I give this movie four out of five stars, and the one star missing is simply because they handwaved the science. Yes, wormholes are theoretically proposed, but why the hell they are there nobody knows; they didn’t try to explain it. I’m okay with it, but at the same time, I’m not okay with it. I enjoyed the movie, and I’ll go again.
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