The Best Dino Movie Of The Century — And Sly Spielberg Subversion — Is Now On 4K

To say that the only iconic movie dinosaurs are found in the Jurassic Park franchise would be cinematic sacrilege, dismissing giants like Ray Harryhausen, Don Bluth, Phil Tippett and Ishiro Honda. But since Steven Spielberg’s adventure series rules ‘90s multiplexes, non-Jurassic dinosaur films have dwindled, like a rabble of raptors who don’t want to mess with the alpha T-Rex.

But it’s significant that the best original dino movie since 1993, The End of Oak Street, now available on 4K, is marked by Amblin DNA — even though its former-indie director and mega-blockbuster producer are more interested in remixing Spielberg than writing him a love letter.

How was The End of Oak Street received upon release?

While August is typically a decent time to release original studio movies as the box office transitions away from the summer tentpoles, The End of Oak Street inevitably suffered from arriving hot on the heels of Spider-Man: Brand New Day. Still, it performed admirably, earning over $100 million worldwide and largely positive reviews, with some standout effusive praise from critics who appreciated the unexpected excitement of the time-warping dino romp. Not everyone agrees, but IndieWire’s proclamation that it was “the biggest surprise of [the] summer” holds real weight.

Why is The End of Oak Street important to see now?

In order to portray humans living at the same time as dinosaurs, some creative liberties must be taken: In Jurassic Park, the dinos are the creation of ambitious genetic engineering; in 65, Adam Driver is an alien who crash lands in Cretaceous-era Earth; in various adaptations of The Lost World explorers discover… well, a lost world. But The End of Oak Street takes inspiration from the portal fantasy genre, transplanting an entire ‘80s suburb into a prehistoric land of dinosaurs, where an entire ecosystem is eager to meet their new neighbors.

But before we do the time warp, the focus on the Platt family — dad Greg (Ewan McGregor), mom Denise (Anne Hathaway), daughter Audrey (Maisy Stella), and son (Christian Convery) — evokes Spielberg’s trademark strained domestic worlds. Greg is concealing his recent layoff and pretending his pizza delivery job is just a side hustle, while Denise is channeling a desire for divorce into a novel manuscript.

Family strife, be it pre-existing or exacerbated by a foreign entity, is the down-to-earth domestic drama that Spielberg and Amblin classics juxtapose their spectacular escapism through, resulting in a picture of American suburbia that is rarely idyllic. In addition, the family patriarch is basically never depicted in strictly heroic terms — in E.T., the father is absent, in Back to the Future, he’s a clueless nerd, and in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, he leaves his family behind to board the mothership.

In The End of Oak Street, the ‘80s suburbs this tone of dysfunction to broader, meaner heights — grumpy neighbor Mel (P.J. Byrne) is practically psychotic in his hatred of the family’s dog Starbuck. Greg hardly commands the most authority in the battle for survival, that would be a shotgun-wielding Denise. The fact that the Platts don’t team up with another family, not to mention that Greg and Denise choose to continue keeping secrets from one another, reinforces the amusing, barbed tension buzzing through Amblin’s family films: These communities are defined by blunt anxieties about wealth, individualism and failure, which persist even after being plunged into the unknown.

The film’s ironized setting is a consequence of its two creative chiefs. Director David Robert Mitchell brought out suburbia’s eeriness in indie films The Myth of the American Sleepover and It Follows, and producer JJ Abrams meshed his childhood movie-making memories with Amblin adventure in his nostalgic film Super 8, itself produced by Spielberg. Now with multiple sci-fi blockbusters under his belt, Abrams has adopted the mentor role for Mitchell, giving The End of Oak Street a decent degree of distance from the Amblin braintrust for the pair to remix those films’ awe, suspense and evocation of small town America, as well as their dark humor.

Mitchell returns again and again to the same type of sight gag: dinosaurs ambling in the background of shots, partially obscured behind fences, treelines, and houses, with human characters not noticing them until it’s embarrassingly, fatally late. The joke works every time, breaking the mirage of calm and jolting the family into comic hysteria; for example, when their arguing stops them from spying a very visible T-Rex comes stomping down a lane towards its next meal, or when a nightmare-inducing Titanoboa snake slithers into the Platt house, filling up hallways and staircases as it noiselessly hunts. Spielberg found humor and pathos in his juxtaposition of the fantastical with working class life; The End of Oak Street finds the typical Spielbergian suburb a far funnier and stranger setting for monster hijinks than Amblin ever imagined.

What new features does The End of Oak Street 4K Blu-ray have?

As The End of Oak Street is a new release, the 4K Blu-ray doesn’t boast the same pedigree of special features we’ve become accustomed to on special edition restorations. Still, there are a few behind-the-scenes docs, focusing on the shoot, the creature designs, and the Spinosaurus attack sequence (a dinosaur that indicates Mitchell and Abrams respect the best Jurassic sequel).