I’ll admit, this is usually the kind of movie I’d wait to catch on streaming. But I was in the mood for the whole theatrical experience — popcorn, soda, a dark theater, and a big, dumb, fun summer movie. So I took the plunge, bought a ticket to an early showing, and hoped for the best.
The basic premise, a 1980s suburban American family is suddenly forced to deal with something incredible. Greg Platt (Ewan McGregor), and Denise Platt (Anne Hathaway) are a family dealing with financial problems, and struggling to communicate. When they are suddenly thrown into a world where communication and unity become necessary for survival.
Ewan McGregor attempting an American accent is always a good time. Anne Hathaway, however, completely commits to the material. She delivers another standout performance as the emotional center of a suburban family already beginning to fracture long before anything prehistoric shows up in their backyard.
Her character is an aspiring writer. Except nobody in her family knows it. She writes in secret, disappearing into the basement late at night or whenever the house is empty, quietly working on a book while everyone around her assumes she’s simply carrying on with ordinary suburban life. It’s a small detail, but an important one — a woman trying to hold her family together while hiding an entire part of herself from them.
Then, overnight, ordinary life disappears. The entire neighborhood gets ripped out of the 1980s and dropped into prehistoric Earth. They are now surrounded by Dinosaurs, and civilization as they knew it, gone. There is no explanation.
Writer, director David Robert Mitchell brings the Spielberg-verse into full effect here. There are obvious shades of E.T., and Jurassic Park. The dinosaurs look fantastic. I especially appreciated that some are depicted with feathers, reflecting our evolving understanding of what these animals probably looked like. They’re not simply recycling the monsters we’ve been watching since Jurassic Park. There’s also a gigantic, disgusting, slimy-looking snake that becomes one of the movie’s more memorable creatures. The family dog, Starbuck? Not so much. Some of that CGI looked rough.
My main issue is that the human characters needed more time to develop. The daughter’s fascination with Carl Sagan feels like it’s setting up something meaningful, but never really develops beyond that. The son suffers from the same problem. His crush on the new girl in the neighborhood, Jeanette (Jordan Alexa Davis), is introduced as an important subplot and then mostly goes nowhere. Which is frustrating because there’s good material buried in there.
I would’ve happily taken another twenty or thirty minutes if it meant giving these characters more room to breathe. The family dynamics are interesting enough that the movie would’ve benefited from slowing down before throwing everyone into the next dinosaur attack. And everyone makes spectacularly terrible decisions. Characters wander off alone. Take unnecessary risks. Walking directly toward things that clearly want to eat them. Basically, everything you’re screaming at the screen for them not to do… they eventually do.
There’s also some wonderfully ridiculous sci-fi logic involving portals, time displacement, and even a phone booth being used in an attempt to save some of the neighbors. Does all of it make sense? Not really. At some point you realize the movie has stopped worrying about whether any of this is particularly logical. Could the film have been longer? Absolutely.
Strangely enough, this film was shot back in 2024, and somehow it took two years to finally reach us. Still, despite its character development issues, this is a fun survival adventure. We have dinosaurs, 80s suburbia, portals, giant snakes, and questionable decision-making. But more importantly, the ending lands. It’s surprisingly emotional, deeply satisfying, and gives the family’s journey the kind of payoff the rest of the film occasionally struggles to earn. Not everything along the way works. But when those final moments arrive…somehow, it all works.
THE END OF OAK STREET (2026). THREE OUT OF FIVE POPCORN BAGS🍿🍿🍿
Rod Rioja 