No filmmaker wants to be judged against the work of Steven Spielberg. But if you’re making a dinosaur movie, you’re basically asking for it.
Writer-director David Robert Mitchell understood this all too well when he made The End of Oak Street, a nostalgia-fueled attempt to revive the dinosaur blockbuster outside the confines of the Jurassic Park and Jurassic World franchise.
Anticipating the inevitable comparisons to Spielberg, Mitchell didn’t shy away from the legendary filmmaker’s far-reaching influence. Instead, he chose to fashion the film as a kind of homage to Spielberg’s classic films. There are the obvious nods to Jurassic Park in the pulse-pounding dinosaur action, but The End of Oak Street also draws plenty of inspiration from E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (it's no coincidence that the film’s setting is 1982, the year E.T. was released).
We see kids riding bicycles through a suburban neighborhood — a Spielbergian tableau if there ever was one — while the central plot mirrors E.T. with its focus on a family in flux. That family is the Platts, a once-happy household forced to fight for their lives when a mysterious light brings about some prehistoric predators to the neighborhood.
Anne Hathaway, appearing in her fourth of five movies this year, plays Denise Platt, an aspiring writer married to her well-meaning but neglectful husband Greg, played by a woefully miscast Ewan McGregor. While Hathaway manages to deliver an emotionally charged and physically demanding performance as the Platts’ matriarch, McGregor comes across as wooden and charmless by comparison.
Hathaway does a lot of heavy lifting throughout the film, both literally and figuratively, and she’s especially magnetic in her scenes with the Platt children, played by Maisy Stella and Christian Convery. But even the immensely talented Hathaway can’t make her on-screen pairing with McGregor work. Due to McGregor’s awkward, barely-there performance, the two have less chemistry than an empty periodic table.
That’s a problem, especially because the film’s third act assumes we care about, let alone like, McGregor’s character. We don’t. And as a result, the entire family’s narrative arc falls flat.
There are other problems with the movie too: underdeveloped side characters, standalone scenes that feel unfinished and a hurried pace in the final stretch. Still, The End of Oak Street does have its strengths. Mitchell should be commended, for example, for recreating the look and feel of Spielberg’s classic period, even if the characters often act more like people in 2026 cosplaying like it’s 1982.
As for the film’s dinosaur-centric set pieces, Mitchell comes through in spades. The action is thrillingly shot without being overly convoluted, which is probably why some critics are calling The End of Oak Street the best dinosaur movie since the first Jurassic Park.
Slander for The Lost World: Jurassic Park notwithstanding, I might agree, simply because the rest of that long-running franchise’s sequels have been so subpar. But the fact that The End of Oak Street is barely above average is really just indicative of Hollywood’s inability to recapture Spielberg’s original magic, no matter how hard they try.
