Florida's Film, Television and the Arts Magazine
The End Of Oak Street
I have so many questions regarding The End Of Oak Street, the first being, what was JJ Abrams thinking? He’s produced so many sci-fi genre projects I loved: Westworld, Lovecraft Country, multiple Star Wars episodes, 11.22.63, Lost.
Maybe the issue is that, according to IMDB, Abrams has 23 upcoming projects on which he’s currently working. Perhaps he got distracted. The bottom line is he let a movie slip by with so many logistical flaws that it became a grind for me to watch.
I adore both Anne Hathaway and Ewan McGregor, who play Denise and Greg Platt, parents to Audrey (Maisy Stella) and Brian (Christian Convery). The Platt’s marriage has stopped working. In the basement of their home, Denise is writing a novel about a mother feeling trapped and leaving her family behind. Brian is secretively drinking … again. Of course, when you’re married, there’s really no such thing as a ‘secret’ alcoholic. And Brian knows about the novel. But that’s not the issue I have with The End Of Oak Street.
My problem concerns multiple, basic logical flaws within the story. Basically, some intergalactic globule has scooped up an entire neighborhood, cut it in a perfect circle, and transported the neighborhood and all it's occupants to some 'zoic'-era. The era may be Mesozoic, Triassic or Jurassic. No way to tell because dinosaurs from each of these eras is in the film. That’s logic problem #1.
Logic problem #2. There’s a scene where at least two smallish dinosaurs explode through some shrubbery and stampede the vehicle under which Denise and Greg have taken cover. So riddle me this, Batman. When you see a horde of small beings, like rats or bats or birds, suddenly burst into the screen and flee madly through the scene – isn’t there ALWAYS something huge and deadly chasing them? But not in The End Of Oak Street. These are random acts of flee. Nothing is chasing them. Bizarre, that it was set up this way, only to fail to connect the obvious dots.
Logic problem #3. The basement in the Platt home gets flooded. Denise is crushed, knowing that her novel is now lost in the flood; this is July 1982, and the document has been composed on a typewriter. Now, some of these dinosaurs are slimy, huge, wormlike, legless sea-creatures. Does this toothy worm slither up from the depths of the flooded basement? Nope. It comes in through the bedroom window. Yes, I’d have liked to have said bathroom, just to toss in a Beatles reference, but I was denied even that.
Logic problem #4. The Platt kids were yelled at by a neighbor who awoke to find a huge pile of excrement on his lawn before the town was enucleated. And the pile stinks to high heaven. He's also threatened to shoot their dog. There’s a huge discussion about it. It’s humorous. After the town is transplanted, the same family walks calmly past multiple piles of said excrement and nobody sniffs. I’m talking feces the height of a VW Beetle. Incomprehensible.
Logic problem #5. This involves a bit of time-line manipulation. If you're in one timeline, and you get sent back to your previous timeline - 20 minutes earlier to be exact - isn't your former self still in the previous timeline? What happens if you meet your previous self? Now that would have made an excellent transitional challange for The End Of Oak Street, putting some real thought into the temporal duplication. Would have added massive interest, at least for me. But I digress.
If you’re fine with your sci-fi being fairly illogical, and just want to see some dinosaurs marauding through neighborhoods, tyrannizing the good people of Oak Street and their innocent pets, by all means, check the film out. I just can’t recommend a film that’s constantly bouncing between horror, sci-fi and humor, not knowing where any scene is going to plant itself. Oh, and the dog lives. There’s nothing unexpected about that revelation. The hints on its survival are dispersed like melting butter on a corn-cob.
