‘The End of Oak Street’'s Ending Finds a Sweet Way Out (of a Dino-Ravaged Place)

The following article contains major spoilers for The End of Oak Street, including its ending.Odds are you left The End of Oak Street thinking the same things I did. Firstly, we need more movies in which Anne Hathaway blasts away velociraptors with an old-timey rifle. Secondly, someone build a statue for Starbuck the heroic dog ASAP. Thirdly, and most importantly, wasn't that an insanely good time at the movies? Much has been made about Martin Scorsese comparing certain blockbusters to theme-park rides, but in this case, it could only be a compliment: once it gets going, Oak Street is like a rollercoaster at Universal Studios, with non-stop dinosaur mayhem and, well, so much running away from T-Rexes.It's got a load of heart, too, evocative of the Spielberg movies of old. The soul of it is basically a movie about a white-picket family in the 1980s—doting dad Greg Platt (Ewan McGregor), hard-as-nails mum Denise (Anne Hathaway), and kids Audrey (Maisy Stella) and Brian (Christian Convery) —who are drifting apart. Greg has lost his job and is delivering pizzas to make ends meet, while Audrey, an author, struggles to reconcile her familial responsibilities with her dream of getting published. Resultantly, they are on the verge of divorce, and the kids are caught in the crossfire. All it takes to bring them back together is their entire picturesque neighborhood—for reasons owing to either “solar flares,” going by some background exposition we hear on the radio, or more likely, because writer-director David Robert Mitchell thought, why the hell not—being transported 200 million years into the past, marital issues taking a backseat to collective survival. Most families go on strained beach vacations when they need to bond, but hey: when life gives you prehistoric lemons.The result is a heartfelt blast, shot with the nostalgic grain and golden-hour sheen of an ‘80s classic. (There’s just as much Close Encounters and E.T. as there is Jurassic Park.) Unlike those antecedents, Oak Street is also metal as fuck: a brutal romp in which the Platts' terrified neighbours are viscerally torn apart by pterodactyls, have their faces mauled by raptors, and are endlessly chased down like antelopes. Even Greg meets his end in the jaws of a T-Rex, being dropped on the ground—his leg snapping in half, which made everyone in my row audibly wince—and bitten in half after saving Denise. Up to that point, we're kind of expecting one of them to get chomped, and the film plays with those expectations: there are a ton of shots where one of the characters is separated from the rest, stood a few meters toward the background, inviting one of the dinosaurs to swoop in and make them lunch. Even so, when it finally happens, it's sobering. And gross.So, how the hell do they get out of this predicament? Throughout the movie, Greg and Denise keep noticing shimmering bubbles that must be portals back to the future, they deduce, as they emit a similar bright light to the one they saw the night they time-travelled. After Greg is eaten, and some other gnarly hijinks ensue, Denise sees one of the portals next to the librarian's house—really, it's more of a swanky mansion, which is maybe a joke about how librarians deserve better salaries—and they rush to jump through before it closes. They make it, eventually, not least thanks to Starbuck saving them all from another pack of pterodactyls (another huge whoop in my audience), and find themselves transported back to 1982, plunging into a very confused woman's pool.So joyously mean-spirited has the film been up to this point, you're constantly waiting for the rug to be pulled from under them. Maybe a dinosaur has followed them through, and is eyeing them up for a late-night snack? But that doesn't come. What's more, they quickly realise that the portal has brought them back 20 minutes before Oak Street was teleported. (Thankfully, it has plonked them safely by the outskirts.) Suddenly, Denise has a brain wave, checks the street number on a local house, and rushes over to a phone booth. She makes a call. Ten minutes later: there's Greg, alive and well again, turning up in his pizza-mobile. (Well, this Greg didn't go through the whole dinosaur ordeal, and was technically always alive. Even so!) In the movie's epilogue, we're even told via a news report that Denise was able to call round and warn some of her neighbours, including the librarian, giving them the chance to escape their sliver of suburbia before it was sent back in time.Compared to the sheer volume of malice demonstrated by Oak Street prior, the ending is almost sickeningly sweet. It's the epitome of a Hollywood fairytale: the family isn't just saved, it is repaired; the final shot has them all assembling in the back garden two years later for a sunkissed barbecue, joined by some of the other survivors. That even includes Audrey's girlfriend and her parents. It's beautiful, really, but that beauty is earned: we're practically waterboarded with thrash-rock, nihilistic chaos for 90-ish minutes, with only sparing moments to catch our breath. So when everyone ends up okay, that's just a relief. Even if it takes a bit of knowingly contrived timey-wimey stuff to get there.But perhaps most gorgeous is the title card that comes up right at the end, dedicating the movie to Robert Mitchell's father, who passed away two years ago. And then it clicks: No wonder Oak Street saved the dad.This story originally appeared in British GQ.