The End of Oak Street: A Sci-Fi Outing Hampered by Its Limiting Premise (4K)

The Film:

Writer/Director David Robert Mitchell has had quite an eclectic career thus far. His first feature film was the coming-of-age comedy/drama "The Myth of the American Sleepover," which had a somewhat mixed reception. However, he changed gears entirely with his second feature, "It Follows," a horror outing with an intriguing concept, though a somewhat repetitive & bland execution. For his second-to-latest project, he once again went for something entirely different with the bizarre black comedy thriller "Under the Silver Lake," which was quite all over the place. Now he returns with "The End of Oak Street," a feature that, despite being firmly in the realm of science-fiction, plays a little more straightforward. Will this curious blend of time travel & dinosaurs finally be the one that has him delivering something particularly impressive?

Taking place in 1982, Greg (Ewan McGregor) and Denise Platt (Anne Hathaway) live with their children Audrey (Maisy Stella) and Brian (Christian Convery) in a house on the rather ordinary Oak Street. Greg and Denise are going through a bit of a rough spot, with the latter even contemplating divorce. Meanwhile, some rather strange things have been happening around the neighborhood, including a long-extinct plant appearing in a neighbor's backyard and a large pile of excrement appearing in another's. This all comes to a head when a storm covers the area in white light, leading to a power outage. However, as the Platt family soon discovers, it also caused their neighborhood to be transported back to prehistoric times, where dinosaurs roam about freely. Will they be able to survive this unusual event and make it back to their proper time?

"The End of Oak Street" does indeed have what one could call a more straightforward premise, one that's basically summed up with a family's neighborhood being thrown back into the days of dinosaurs, which forces them to survive the best they can while hoping to find a way home. It's the kind of concept that may have seemed intriguing on paper, perhaps as a way of having a film involving dinosaurs that's outside of the "Jurassic" franchise, but as we soon see, the execution of the idea is something quite different.

While the idea of a modern-day family having to tangle with dinosaurs may have seemed like a neat foundation for a film, the truth is that it's actually a rather limiting premise. Consider what could happen in such a story, and you'd probably come up with the basics of having the dinosaurs attack the people, the people running away and/or hiding, and a select few trying to fight them off (to their expected detriment). Well, this is pretty much all that writer David Robert Mitchell came up with as well, causing his latest effort to lack any particularly compelling material, which is only further hampered by how thinly-drawn his characters are.

The most depth the parents are given is that they're struggling with their marriage, an element that really ends up having no impact on the story, while the only character trait given to their son is that he really loves his dog. Meanwhile, the daughter's trajectory is basically to watch over her brother during the incident, leaving us not only with a plot that doesn't really have anywhere to go, but also characters that simply aren't given much to do.

Then there's the film's somewhat disturbing ending, which seems to prove quite conclusively that Mitchell doesn't really grasp the basic principles of time travel. Clearly he thought his conclusion wrapped everything up rather neatly, but what it actually does is leave several important questions unanswered. There will be those that perhaps see this as nitpicking, while saying that you should just roll with it and pretend that it closes the tale well-enough, but when the holes in the story are this gaping, it's kind of difficult to just toss them aside without mentioning that they're there.

In the end, "The End of Oak Street" is an idea that would've been best served by staying on paper, where it at least seemed like a cool premise. There doesn't really seem to be anything that Mitchell could've done to improve it, again because there just isn't much that could be done with this story, and not wanting to go into the complications brought about by his simplistic ending is understandable, but that merely leaves them glaring for everyone to see, ultimately leaving us with a film which comes off as a sub-par episode of "The Twilight Zone" that someone tried to stretch to feature length, with hardly-surprising results.

Video/Audio:

"The End of Oak Street" comes to 4K in a 2.39:1, 2160p Ultra High Definition transfer of mostly decent quality. While the image presented is sharp and clear for the most part, unfortunately a curious filtering method has also been applied to give it a more film-like aesthetic, which in turn makes it considerably darker than it would normally be. On the other hand, the Dolby Atmos-TrueHD audio track is fantastic, giving you all of the dialogue, sound effects, and Michael Giacchino's score in excellent quality. Overall, while they really should've rethought the post-production treatment of the video, the new UHD release still presents a satisfactory experience in both areas.

Special Features:

Banding Together: The Making of The End of Oak Street (19 Minutes): A behind-the-scenes featurette that explores the film's ensemble.

Every Creature Tells a Story: The Dinosaurs of Oak Street (12 Minutes): A featurette that takes a look at the film's various dinosaurs.

The Spinosaurus Attack: Driving Fear on Oak Street (7 Minutes): A featurette that delves into into one of the film's biggest action sequences.

Conclusion:

David Robert Mitchell's "The End of Oak Street" is an idea that may have seemed cool on paper, but in execution it sadly reveals itself to be a rather limiting premise, which when combined with its thinly-drawn characters and overly-simplistic ending, ultimately makes for a rather uneventful & forgettable outing that should've stayed on the page.

Score: 2.5/5

Available on 4K starting tomorrow.

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