Tag: dinosaurs

The first part of this review is free from major narrative spoilers for The End of Oak Street. The end of the spoiler-free section is clearly marked.

I would’ve been around ten when Jurassic Park hit cinemas, and I can vividly recall going to see the film with my friend and his dad and being absolutely enthralled. Jurassic Park brought dinosaurs to life in a way that nothing else at the time could even compare to, and it told a tense, exciting, and action-packed story to boot. The scene where the lawyer, sitting on the toilet, gets attacked by a T. Rex is *still* one of the most memorable moments in all of cinema for me.

After watching Jurassic Park, I bought the video game adaptation for my brand-new SNES, and I think I even had a poster of the film in my bedroom for a time. I actually *still* own – and, yes, occasionally wear – a Jurassic Park baseball cap! So suffice to say that I’m a fan of dino-thrillers, at least when they manage to stick the landing. Jurassic Park’s sequels have been hit and miss, though, so I was truly fascinated to see what a totally new take on this “humans-versus-dinosaurs” tale would look like when I caught a glimpse of The End of Oak Street’s trailer.

The film leans into plenty of tropes of the action and drama genres, takes quite a while to get going, has a few side-characters who feel pretty one-dimensional, and has a somewhat complicated ending that – some will argue – might lessen the impact of its biggest twists and set-pieces, especially on a repeat viewing. However… I genuinely had a great time with this film. I don’t think it’s gonna be a “film-of-the-year” contender, necessarily – but as a fresh take on the dinosaur adventure sub-genre, away from the confines of Jurassic Park, and doing a lot to update the way dinosaurs look? I think it worked pretty well.

I’ll get into more detail with visuals and CGI if you stick around to the spoiler-ific part of the review, but for now, I can say that The End of Oak Street relies heavily on CGI… most of which (but not all) manages to stick the landing. There are a variety of different dinosaurs – some of which may be familiar to you and some of which, at least to me, were brand new – and they were intimidating when they needed to be, grotesque at times, and occasionally even cute or funny. At a few points, I felt that some fantasically creative art direction and design was let down just a little by deficiencies in the animation, but this is by no means a “bad-looking” film on the whole.

While nothing in The End of Oak Street’s score is going to be as iconic or instantly-recognisable as John Williams’ Jurassic Park theme, it was solid. My rule of thumb for any film’s soundtrack is first and foremost “do no harm;” i.e. the music shouldn’t get in the way or pull me out of what I’m watching. There were a couple of places where familiar songs from the eighties set the tone or helped anchor the film in its chosen decade, and beyond that, the score was tense, mysterious, sombre, and action-packed at the right moments.

I think I said in one of my preview pieces earlier in the year that, if I had any concerns going into The End of Oak Street, it was co-star Ewan McGregor – and specifically, his “American” accent. I will caveat this by saying that I don’t think McGregor’s accent was flawless, but it was far less of an issue than I feared it might’ve been based on the trailer, and he was convincing enough in his role as to not put me off or take me out of the action.

Anne Hathaway seldom has a bad outing, and she was great in her role as the family’s mother, getting one particularly emotional moment that she absolutely nailed. I also want to give credit to Maisy Stella, who took on a challenging and emotional role as Audrey, and did an exceptional job. We’ll get into more detail with these characters in the spoiler-filled section, but I wanted to acknowledge some of these performers for the work they put in. I’m not at all familiar with any of Stella’s other work, but any time a younger performer excels in this kind of role, I think they deserve to be acknowledged for that!

Narratively, I would say that The End of Oak Street took a bit longer to get going than it really needed to. Once we’d established the basics of the main four characters and set up a couple of points that would become important later, the rest of it was just scene-setting fluff at best, overdone eighties nostalgia at worst. For a film that doesn’t have an exceptionally long runtime, I think we could’ve trimmed some of the fat here and spent a bit more time with the main characters as they struggled to adapt to the strange events unfolding around them.

When the main story got going, however, I felt it worked pretty well. There are a couple of ideas – which we’ll get into if you stick with me later on – that may either have needed a bit more explanation or which, for a variety of reasons, I could see being contentious for some viewers. But the core narrative, focusing on a family trying to stick together and survive a traumatic and inexplicable event… I think it worked pretty well. And the dinosaurs made for such an interesting antagonist; as terrifying and monstrous as they could seem, they’re just animals, at the end of the day, and they’re trying to survive, too.

I think I’ve said everything I can without getting into story spoilers. If you just came here for a recommendation, then it’s a solid “yes!” I’m happy to recommend The End of Oak Street. At time of writing, the film is available on video-on-demand platforms to buy or rent, and here in the UK at least, it’s also still in some cinemas. But it’ll almost certainly be on DVD and a streaming platform before the end of the year, if you’re content to wait.

Up next, we’ll talk about the plot, characters, and some spoiler-y details.

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This is the end of the spoiler-free section. There are spoilers for The End of Oak Street, including its ending, from here on out.

Okay, before we do anything else, I *have* to talk about these dinosaurs!

In the ’90s, when Michael Crichton was writing Jurassic Park and Steven Spielberg was working on the film adaptation, most palaeontologists were working under the assumption that dinosaurs looked kind of similar to crocodiles, lizards, and other modern-day reptiles – i.e. they were hairless, scaly, covered with skin, and wouldn’t look out-of-place next to a modern alligator or Komodo dragon. That assumption, we have since learned, was *wrong*!

Many dinosaurs had feathers, or proto-feathers, which helped them keep warm or regulate their body temperatures. These feathers may have also been useful for camouflage, as well as for threat displays and even mating rituals.

But because Jurassic Park is such an institution, almost every pop-culture depiction of dinosaurs since has followed that film’s model, meaning featherless, reptilian dinos are still the norm. Even a recent Star Trek episode featured a T. Rex very much in the Jurassic Park mould – so it really is everywhere!

It was such an incredible treat, then, when The End of Oak Street updated the way (most) of its dinosaurs appeared to be more in line with what science has learned over the last thirty-odd years.

I absolutely *adored* the way the feathered dinosaurs looked in this film; for someone who cares about accuracy and who thinks entertainment should try to keep up with real-world developments, the dinosaurs just looked fantastic. There were a few “uncanny valley” moments with the dinosaurs, particularly in a couple of very fast-moving sequences, but by and large they were visually stunning. And I really think this point is worth emphasising, because too many films – even supposed documentaries or educational pieces – rely on depictions of dinosaurs that are just plain outdated and factually incorrect, so when someone gets it right, it’s worth celebrating!

There was also some fantastic diversity on display. We got some smaller dinosaurs, akin to real-world velociraptors, flying pterosaurs of some kind, large herbivores, chunky, heavily-armoured crocodilian types, as well as a water-dwelling snake, and several larger predators, too.

In an action-adventure film with thriller, horror, and sci-fi elements, it’s obvious that we’re going to be running away from vicious dinosaurs rather than getting up close and studying more peaceful ones! And that was true in The End of Oak Street in 2026 just as much as it was in Jurassic Park back in 1993. But there were still a few places where the film took its time, allowing these animals – and they *are* just animals, at the end of the day – to exist on their own terms. Several moments, and even just lingering camera shots, were quite compelling and even beautiful.

I’m glad that The End of Oak Street had time to sprinkle in a few of these smaller moments. Despite the chaos that unfolded around the Platt family and their neighbours, there was still time to appreciate that these extinct animals were just as out-of-place in suburbia as suburbia was in their rainforest. And while some dinosaurs quickly took advantage of the change, preying on humans (and other animals), some just… chilled. There were moments where dinos were wandering the streets, curiously investigating this strange, new world. Moments where they were eating – one hilarious moment saw a diplodocus/brontosaurus type eating ice cream from a damaged van. And others were drinking from pools, eating from gardens, or just seeming to hang out in the streets. These moments were small, and they weren’t the focus of the film. But I really appreciated them; it made the dinosaurs feel a lot more like real animals and less like movie monsters, if that makes sense.

And, of course, who could forget the “mating” scene?! The longest and most light-hearted of the dinosaur scenes, where Denise stopped to snap a photo of Greg… it was funny and also quite a sweet moment between the characters.

I can see the film’s ending – its *happy* ending – being a point of contention for some viewers. And I will admit, the thought crossed my mind, too; why, after all the film did to show characters being killed, would it swoop in and “undo” some of that with mere seconds remaining? But having sat with it for a little while, I think I’m actually quite glad that The End of Oak Street got a happy ending.

We’re ever more used to films with bittersweet or just plain *dark* endings nowadays; those tend to be seen as more gritty and realistic, I guess. But there’s still room in cinema for films that manage to find a pathway to a genuinely happy ending, and for me, The End of Oak Street is one of them. We don’t need to see everyone die – or even lose some of the few survivors – in order for the film to make sense or work, and a nice, well-managed, uplifting ending can be right for some stories. It isn’t right for every story, of course, but the time-travel portal… thing? It worked for me this time.

Greg’s death was one of the film’s most shocking and brutal moments. There had been other characters killed, of course, but outside of the main protagonists, most characters felt pretty flat, tropey, or just plain uninspired, so their deaths didn’t really hit as hard – despite the brutality and gore that some of them had. But undoing Greg’s death was a choice – and it’s a choice I can see some folks having trouble with, because it literally “undoes” one of the film’s biggest and most major twists.

In fact, pretty much every named character that we saw killed off – Jeanette’s parents, the librarian, and the grumpy neighbour – were also saved by Denise’s last-second actions at the end of the film, and again… that may not work for everyone. But because this is a time-loop-portal… thing? Those events aren’t erased by her actions; they still happened in the version of the timeline that the four survivors went through. At least, that’s how I read it, and that justification works well enough for me – especially in a film that, to be honest with you, I don’t need to think *too* hard about!

Let’s stick with the time-portal things. I guess the film presents them as “wormholes,” so we’ll try to keep to that terminology.

Sometimes you can just tell when a story is setting up something that’s going to lead to a dump of exposition, and for me, that happened with Audrey being the nerdy girl who was really into Carl Sagan, science, astronomy, and all of that. I didn’t feel this really had enough time dedicated to it earlier in the film to fully justify how quickly everyone bought into the wormhole idea, and it probably needed a bit more to really sell me on both the character’s key interest and how it would help everyone later on.

However, in a film that I just want to watch and be entertained by… I don’t think that’s as big of a hurdle as it sounds! The point of The End of Oak Street isn’t to get into the weeds with time travel, wormholes, and theories of relativity. It’s to have fun running around with dinosaurs, to be shocked by a few gory deaths, and to root for our heroes as they try to make it home. And with that in mind, the way the wormhole element was introduced – and how one character was familiar enough with the concept to give everyone else the idea of using it to get home – stuck the landing.

I liked the visual effect used for the wormholes, too. They appeared not as “holes” or two-dimensional circles, but as fully three-dimensional spheres – which, if you think about it, probably makes more sense based on our scientific understanding of the principles behind wormholes and different dimensions! I also thought it was neat how The End of Oak Street depicted the aftermath of a wormhole’s presence – trees, walls, cars, even whole buildings just “sliced” cleanly, as if with a knife. It made for an interesting visual presentation.

Another thing I found interesting – and that I’d say The End of Oak Street did well, and will help it stand out – was the relative lack of guns. Some action, horror, and survival-type films, especially if they’re set in America, will be all “guns-ablaze” – which *can* be fine, depending on what kind of story they’re going for. But the Platt family don’t seem to have owned a gun, and the gun that Denise was able to acquire clearly had very limited ammunition before being lost entirely. Giving the characters makeshift weapons – a box cutter, a fire poker, a sledgehammer, and so on – made their desperate situation feel all the more dangerous and intense. If someone in the neighbourhood had been a doomsday prepper with an arsenal of grenades and machine guns… I mean, the film would’ve been a lot less fun.

Maybe this is just me, but I always wince when I see an animal injured or in pain in a film – even a *clearly* fictitious, CGI animal like The End of Oak Street’s dinosaurs. I think it’s a testament to both the design of the dinosaurs (as discussed above) and the way in which they were incorporated into the story that I felt… well, sorry for some of them when they were hurt or in pain. These creatures weren’t malicious; they weren’t killing for sport. They were just animals, exploring a weird intrusion into their world – and discovering a potential new food source. Maybe I’m *too* sympathetic here – and I will accept that judgement, if it be the case! But for me, there were several moments where hurt or injured dinos, even if they’d been hunting our heroes, tugged at the heartstrings a little.

A couple of moments from The End of Oak Street are gonna stick in my brain for a while, I think!

Firstly, we have Greg’s brutal death. The death itself was sufficiently gory, with him first losing a leg, then being chomped on by a large predator. But what stood out to me the most was Denise’s reaction – that stunned, broken look that she got as she tried to process what she was seeing, and then how her focus had to immediately switch to the kids – getting them to look away, trying to usher them to safety, and then trying to keep it together after what had happened.

The film did a reasonable job with the “bickering couple rediscovers their love amidst an impossible situation” trope, and by the time of Greg’s death, I felt certain that that was all I would have to say about that particular storyline! It was a cliché, but one that the film did enough to justify. But Greg’s death came at just the right point in the script – when it seemed as if everyone was figuring out how to survive and might actually make it through to the end – and it was genuinely shocking and brutal.

The second thing that’s sticking with me is the giant snake-like dinosaur, and how it seemed to stalk Brian all the way back home before infiltrating the Platt household. That animal – perhaps more so than any other in the film – felt incredibly creepy and realistic, and the way it moved… I mean, I guess I can see why some people have a phobia of snakes!

The fire breaking out added another sense of dread and time running out as Denise and the kids desperately tried to make it to the wormhole. And Starbuck’s last-second arrival, saving Brian, was an exceptionally well-played story beat that the film had set up earlier on. I love a film with a cute animal protagonist, and Starbuck definitely fit the bill this time.

Good dog!

I didn’t make much of the “Brian versus the bully” story, though – it was set up okay, with Brian having apparently caused an injury to another kid before the events of The End of Oak Street. But I felt the film could’ve made more of this – Brian could’ve had to choose, for example, to save the bully from a dinosaur attack, or even just discover that he’d been killed and re-evaluate some of his choices. There was the potential to use this as a way to show some character growth, but if that was ever the intention, it didn’t make it to screen.

There was also a hit – just a hint – at a potential relationship between Jeanette and Audrey, and I think that was reasonably well done. Not every film needs a ton of romance or relationship drama, and we got plenty of that in reverse with Greg and Denise! But as a little hint at something more – that’s definitely subject to interpretation – I think it worked pretty well.

So I think we should wrap things up!

The End of Oak Street feels like a film that’s reinvigorated the dinosaur genre after Jurassic Park and Jurassic World have gotten a little stale. I liked the juxtaposition of an early eighties suburban family with this completely wild and unpredictable situation, and there was just enough of a grounding in real-world science to make the wormhole idea not seem like a complete fantasy. I don’t think The End of Oak Street is particularly deep – but it doesn’t need to be. It’s a thrilling, action-packed ride with a happy ending, and I was content to go on this one-off adventure with the Platt family.

Though I don’t think this’ll be a real contender, I hope you’ll join me in late December when I hand out some of my annual “End-of-Year Awards.” It’s possible that The End of Oak Street will make an appearance in some form. It’s certainly one of the better films that I’ve seen in 2026, and I’m glad I was able to sit down and watch it. I didn’t mind paying a little extra to watch it on demand, either.

So that’s all for today! Thanks for joining me for this review. I’m a pretty big dinosaur fan, so The End of Oak Street had been on my radar for a while. Earlier this year, I’ve reviewed such films as 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, The SpongeBob Movie: Search for SquarePants, Iron Lung, The Super Mario Galaxy Movie, The Mandalorian and Grogu, and Disclosure Day. You can click or tap those links to check out any of those reviews, if that sounds like something you’d be interested in! And there are a few other titles I’m hoping to get to before the end of 2026, too, so be sure to check back from time to time to see which ones I manage to write full reviews of!

Thanks again for reading… and watch out for dinosaurs!

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The End of Oak Street is currently only available to purchase or rent via on-demand platforms like Amazon, Apple TV Store, and the Sky Store. The film may also be available to watch in cinemas, and will likely come to streaming and/or DVD and Blu-ray later in 2026. The End of Oak Street is the copyright of Bad Robot, Jackson Pictures, and/or Warner Bros. Pictures. This review contains the thoughts and opinions of one person only and is not intended to cause any offence.