Editor’s Note: With the summer heat still upon us and those air conditioned movie theaters calling our name, what we all want is a fun summer popcorn movie. Freeline Media critic Mike Fried has just the ticket. Read on!

By MIKE FRIED

THE END OF OAK STREET

4/5

Watching this movie, I immediately thought of the opening lyrics to the really bad 1960s TV Show It’s About Time. which went “It’s about time, It’s about space, about strange people in the strangest place.” These lyrics apply here.

It’s 1982. The Platt family lives, where else, on Oak Street, in a suburb of Michigan. The family is a Denise, a wannabe writer; her husband Greg; daughter Audrey; and son Brian. Denise isn’t happy with her marriage (she is bothered by her husband’s unbridled optimism) to Greg who has lost his job – unknown to her – and delivers pizzas not as a side hustle but as his main source of income. Denise notices a plant growing in her neighbor’s backyard and when she takes a picture of it, a very smart public librarian tells her that it is evidently a plant that went extinct hundreds of millions of years ago – librarians were smart back in 1982 when people actually read and didn’t just scroll!

One night, the house is engulfed in a white light and the power goes out. The next morning, the family realizes that they are in prehistoric times and there be dinosaurs all around.  And not only dinosaurs, but an erupting volcano in the distance which provides some more menace.

Well, it’s no secret that producer J.J. Abrams worships at the altar of Steven Spielberg – Super 8, of course, was his love letter to Steven – and this movie, involving dinosaurs, and set one July 11, 1982, exactly one month after the release of E.T. – just falls right into that wheelhouse, even beginning with the 1980s Warner Brothers logo.

This is one terrific movie. One of the things that make this movie work (even though it’s a high concept film) is that Abrams and director David Robert Mitchell (who also wrote the screenplay) wisely chose to follow the example of Jurassic Park III and make this movie 90 minutes without the credits. In addition, the movie eases into any dinosaur antics and takes almost 30 minutes to get going with the action, and what this wisely does is: set up the timeframe (1982), set up the family dynamic and, more importantly, the family drama – mom and dad aren’t getting along, another Spielberg trope, which is very relevant, but would have bogged down the film if mom and dad fought during the action portion of the film.

The entire cast is excellent. Anne Hathaway and especially Ewan McGregor are excellent as the parents. Hathaway plays a very strong 1980s mom who is secretly writing a novel about a family with problems – and this travel to prehistoric times puts a damper on her writing career – but she becomes Ripley out of Aliens when her family is threatened. McGregor plays a schlub that was laid off from his job and was too afraid to tell his wife about it because he is a schlub. And he does play the role so well, but when push comes to shove in prehistoric times, he becomes the protector of his family and redeems himself. 

The actors who played the kids are good, but they are sort of generic kids cast because they look like they are straight out of Stranger Things. I really enjoyed seeing P.J. Byrne as the asshole next door neighbor Max, who when he sees what Ian Malcolm would call “a big pile of shit” on his lawn he immediately suspects that it is Greg and Denise‘s son, Brian, playing a prank. He is such an asshole that his run in with a band of pterodactyls might even become iconic.

The movie revels in its effects and certainly while most of the effects are computer generated imagery, there are a lot of practical effects put to good use. There’s a scene early on where Greg goes to look for the family dog and he’s walking in this fenced off path between backyards of houses. In one of the houses he thinks he sees the dog so he goes to investigate and it turns out to be something much bigger. As Greg vaults the fence to run away down the path, there are swings and backyard objects that are just thrown from the other side of the fence as if a dinosaur was running through them, but it’s all done by hand and it is a very practical inexpensive way to ensure show dinosaur activity without showing the dinosaur.  There is also a certain amount of live action dinosaurs for close-up shots. The effects are really done well and I would expect that this film will get an Oscar nomination for best visual effects.

In addition, the cinematography is outstanding — I read somewhere that there were in excess of 60 split-diopter shots that allowed the foreground and background to remain in equal focus and that I think may exceed the number of split-diopter shots that brain DePalma used in his entire career.  In addition, the production design and costume design is equally effective. There is a block party at the beginning of the film and a lot of people are wearing that familiar 80s hue of beige, orange and brown.  The Platt’s car is a disgusting green that was unfortunately on the market at the time.

While I note that many critics are saying that this is the best dinosaur film since Jurassic Park, I’d both agree and disagree with this statement.  This movie had a better story in terms of the family drama then the Jurassic franchise had in any of the seven films. But I suspect this film would not have even been made had it not been for the advancements made during the production of the Jurassic Park and Jurassic World films.  It really is a double-edged sword.

And we should also be thankful for Carl Sagan and Back to the Future. That’s all I’ll say on this point.  Like I said, this movie is an ode to Steven Spielberg and the creativity that he showed in films in the 70s and 80s and 90s and without him Oak Street would not have existed at all.  Even Spielberg’s sentimentality courses through Oak Street’s veins.

I had the pleasure of seeing this with a fairly young audience and their parents that responded to the film excitedly and that helped in my overall impression.

This is summer popcorn entertainment of the highest order and I think you should run out and WATCH IT! 

Michael Fried has no formal training in movies, except having watched over 26,000+ movies — if not more — in his 60-plus years on this planet, starting with Goldfinger as his first cinema experience. He knows what he likes and he knows what he doesn’t like, and it’s quite often different from the conventional wisdom. He knows that the best franchise is Godzilla and he loves action movies and comedies. He has not been nominated for any awards except some boring insurance awards which has no applicability to movies (with the possible exceptions of Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity and John Cassavettes’ Big Trouble). He is part of a team that won the 1980 SUNY Albany Trivia content by correctly guessing the question, “Who played the president of Klopstockia in Million Dollar Legs?” So he has that going for him, which is nice.

Contact Mike at moviemike3@gmail.com and mike.fried@yahoo.com.