David Robert Mitchell, “The End of Oak Street” (2026)
The premise is intriguing enough, and one might detect a critique of 1980s- American-style suburbia (with all its smug self-absorption, isolation and hidden – or repressed – family traumas and problems) implied in the way the plot rolls out: a typical family living in a comfortable middle-class neighbourhood in 1982 finds its street suddenly transported into a tropical Mesozoic-era landscape, and must fight its way out of being fast food for dinosaurs and work out how to return to Reagan-era America. At the start of the film, despite presenting as a happy unit at the annual Oak Street fair, the Platts are deeply unhappy in their own ways: ambitious Denise (Anne Hathaway) is dissatisfied with the way her life has turned out, and pours her marriage woes and divorce plans into a novel she is secretly writing in the Platt family house basement, while laidback husband Greg (Ewan McGregor), having lost his full-time job, is working as a casual pizza-delivery driver. The two children, Audrey (Maisy Stella) and Brian (Chris Convery), have teenage issues of their own. Around the Platts, odd incidents have been occurring: a lady living up the road finds an unusual plant growing in her backyard, which is later identified by local community librarian Mrs Valcourt (Emily Kuroda) as a prehistoric plant, and Mr Jacobs (P J Byrne), the ratchety neighbour next door to the Platts who complains about their dog Starbuck, finds an extraordinary tower of poop in his backyard. Then overnight, an alarming electric storm that nearly blinds and deafens everyone in the street occurs, Starbuck runs off, the electricity cuts out, and the Platts soon discover their entire street has been relocated into a world where the value of Oak Street homes quickly hits flatlining levels as the weather becomes hot and humid, heated geysers start gushing from driveways and the local bird life has shot up in size and sprouted arms, legs, claws and – most of all – huge teeth and the appetites to match.
From then on, the Platts race for survival against time and their better judgements as Brian goes haring off to find Starbuck, Audrey goes haring off to find Brian, and the parents go haring off to find the kids, after spending an entire day boarding up the house against various Jurassic-era giants. Despite narrowly escaping being chomped or stomped upon, the Platts rescue a local girl, Jeannette (Jordan Alexa Davis), and are reunited with Starbuck in a most unexpected way. Even though Brian and Audrey do some extraordinarily dumb things, they have enough intelligence to work out that the strange lights they sometimes see are wormhole portals that might offer an escape route. Denise and Greg, after having confessed secrets they are hiding from each other, have just enough time to patch up their differences and reconcile before an unfortunate encounter with an Allosaurus separates them – permanently. It falls to the remaining adult Platt to corral Audrey, Brian, Jeannette and the fur baby, and bring them all to Mrs Valcourt’s house where a wormhole portal blinking on and off in a tree offers a potential escape route. Once they are safe, and (spoiler alert) back in their own time (or a bit before, actually – after all, what is an extra 20-minute early break to wormhole portals that operate over hundreds of millions of years?), Denise is able to save Greg in advance of the original wormhole storm and get out most of the Oak Street residents including Jeannette’s entire family and the crabby Mr Jacobs before they’re become unwilling time travellers.
The film starts strongly and its progress is steady enough for viewers to see the individual Platt family members’ characters develop, with all their insecurities, problems and quirks, and one can almost guess who will survive and who won’t. For all her apparent fragility, and despite the traumas she faces, Denise turns out not only to have nerves of steel but enough imagination and nous to shepherd her kids and another child to safety. In a rare moment (for a Hollywood flick), when the Platts are discussing their survival chances and revealing their views on life, everything and the universe, Greg confesses to having a child-like faith in God and believing that all will turn out well; in the cynical world that is the commercial movie industry, this admission makes him a marked man. While Hathaway clearly has the best role – and practically runs away with it, with superior acting that embraces grit, fright, near-catatonia and parental self-sacrifice – poor McGregor must make do portraying a man who has achieved less in life than he wanted to, due in part to circumstances beyond his control and to his easy-going, beta-male personality. Once the film dumps the Platts and their street back on the wrong side of the K-T boundary, and they literally start running around in circles, the incidents become increasingly unrealistic and flimsy, with the kids doing everything they can to get themselves in trouble and the adults paying the consequences. The minor cast members are given short shrift by the shallow plot as one by one the rest of the Oak Street residents are cut down by feathered and non-feathered wildlife. (One would think that even in 1980s America, before Gordon Gekko declared “Greed is good!”, middle class people were still neighbourly enough to help one another, ensure everyone was safe, and then go out as a group to defend their families and homes against a most unlikely invasion of pre-Palaeolithic immigrants.)
Of course, this being a family film, there are messages about parental love and self-sacrifice, family members setting aside differences and grudges, reconciling and bonding together in times of crisis, and eventually reaching out to others for help and to help them as well. The film ends on a happy note of neighbourly friendship and bonding, and what could have been catastrophic for an entire community instead ends up advancing US scientific and military knowledge. In real life though, it’s doubtful that 20 minutes would have given Denise enough time to raise the alarm among her Oak Street neighbours – they would all need thorough convincing first – and others to get the hell out before the entire neighbourhood is lifted out of its time zone.
I do have a hunch that in time this film might achieve cult status for its portrayal of American suburban middle class life and its secrets and traumas, represented perhaps by the removal of the Oak Street neighbourhood back to a time when life forms were ruled by primitive instincts and emotions, and how people living in isolation from one another might react when those repressed secrets eventually erupt.