It’s admittedly hard to believe that a movie about a suburban neighborhood pulled back in time to the age of dinosaurs would have a distinctly emotional bent, but that was exactly the case with The End of Oak Street. As the movie goes on, it becomes increasingly clear that the dinosaurs are a metaphor for a changing world, one suffused with grief and loss (though it’s never heavy-handed in the delivery of that metaphor). The film also ended with a tribute that was incredibly important to director David Robert Mitchell, one he made to his father, who passed away in 2024.
Sitting down with ComicBook, Mitchell delved a little deeper into that tribute, explaining why it was so important to include in the movie. “My dad, he loved dinosaurs. He worked for Chrysler his whole life, but I think he dreamed of being a paleontologist.” Elaborating a bit more, he added, “I thought someday it would be great to make a dinosaur movie. And when I had the idea for it, there was an element of the personal to it, in terms of it being set in the 80s, when I was a kid. There’s a little bit of reflection and memory with family. So it is a movie that I made for my father.”
While the movie leans heavily on nostalgia aimed at Gen-Xers and older millennials, it’s not the film’s driving force or the only thing it brings to the table. Starring Ewan McGregor and Anne Hathaway, the film centers on the Platt family, whose suburban neighborhood is ripped through time and space. Which means that to keep their two kids safe, they now have dinosaurs to contend with (and Anne Hathaway gets a gun, which makes most things 10x cooler). So far, The End of Oak Street has earned an impressive 85% with critics, though it trails slightly behind with audiences at 78%. But despite that lag, it’s still proving to be an almost entirely enjoyable film.
Critic Jeffrey Harris summed up what worked best about the movie, saying, “David Robert Mitchell proves exceptionally adept at crafting a fun throwback sci-fi adventure movie in The End of Oak Street. He honors his influences but still presents a thrilling cinematic adventure.” And it seems that that’s what critics and audiences in general found most enjoyable about the film—that it was an homage to the decade that put creature features on the map, while still maintaining a feeling that came across as wholly original. And in the end, it’s that originality that makes it such an incredibly heartfelt tribute to the person that brought Mitchell to the world of dinosaurs and horror in the first place.
