The End of Oak Street, out digitally on September 15, should have been a box office hit on paper. Just look at the trailer. It’s an ’80s throwback movie! It has dinosaurs! It has Anne Hathaway fighting the dinosaurs with a shotgun! How could it miss? But for whatever reason, this movie was 2026’s summer blockbuster that wasn’t.
Me, I went to see it expecting a movie that was mainly about, well, Anne Hathaway fighting dinosaurs with a shotgun. But one trailer line teased that it might have a bit more on its mind.
Are You There, God?
The family has finally put together the Big Premise (that a solar flare has flung sleepy suburban Oak Street back in time to the Mesozoic era). The dad, Greg, an eternal optimist, boldly predicts, “God’s not gonna let us die here.”
Anne Hathaway’s Denise is not inspired. She harshly reminds Greg that he only ever goes to church for Christmas, so whence all this God talk all of a sudden? Also, daughter Audrey chimes in, “What about the people out there getting eaten?” Only Brian, the son, joins his dad in optimistic faith.
Audrey is an aspiring physicist and certified Carl Sagan nerd. She sets up the movie with an ominous foreshadowing line to a friend, sharing her favorite Saganism: “We are butterflies who flutter for a day and think it is forever.” We imagine ourselves as the triumphant culmination of history, but as Sagan liked to remind his readers, we and our pale blue dot are really not all that. And there is definitely no one up in the sky hearing us pray. But that’s okay!
Later in the movie, as Audrey comforts a girl whose parents have been eaten, the girl asks, “Do you believe in God?” Audrey still carries that Carl Sagan atheist card, but Brian once again makes a declaration of faith. Granted, he does so partly because he knows the neighbor girl goes to Catholic school and wants to impress her, but also because he’s sincere. When he comments wonderingly on the fact that her school lets kids pray, she informs him that “You can pray wherever you want.”
Blind Indifference, Red in Tooth and Claw
This is a PG-13 movie flirting with an R. I was not prepared for the sheer quantity of, er, chomping. Not that it’s personal. It’s no Planet of the Dinosaurs here. There is not a glimmer of super-dino intelligence to be detected anywhere. They’re just…well, hungry. They eat what they want, when and where they want. Same for everything else animals do (and yes, we see them doing that too).
As we watch, Audrey’s question nags. Nobody on poor Oak Street deserves this, not even the terminally annoying neighbor who commits suicide by Pteranodon. We hear the voice of Richard Dawkins narrating the gruesome scene in our heads, talking about the “blind, pitiless indifference” of nature. It doesn’t get more pitilessly indifferent than these sometimes scaly, sometimes feathery villains-that-aren’t-really-villains.
As the camera slowly pans across a surreal scene — one dinosaur defecating, another burying its head in an ice cream truck — we’re being invited to wonder, “Does any of this matter? Do we matter? Are we special?”
Adam and Eve vs. The Dinosaurs
The End of Oak Street was marketed as a stupid dinosaur movie. In reality, it’s a movie about marriage, cleverly disguised as a stupid dinosaur movie.
Greg and Denise’s marriage is bad. It’s really bad. By the time we meet them, it’s just about over. Greg — in typical modern Hollywood father fashion — is emasculated, daffy, and nursing a drinking problem. Denise spends her free time in the basement, writing a divorce fantasy novel she thinks he hasn’t discovered. The final scene is a mother leaving her family, free at last. But before she can finish typing it up, prehistory intervenes, flooding her dreams in ancient bilge.
Inevitably, the family members get separated, and Greg and Denise spend a nail-biting stretch trying to survive together, like a fallen Adam and Eve in a garden paradise turned Hell. Of course, it is only now that they realize they need each other. And as badly as they have hurt each other, they would die for each other. Neither of which a dinosaur could do.
Villains and Heroes
Brian desperately wants to be a hero. He meets prehistory terrified but brave, clutching a bow and arrows. While they can’t exactly fell a T-Rex, they come in surprisingly handy at convenient plot moments. Moments that make you think, “That’s right, humans are pretty special.”
Humans are both the villains and the heroes of this movie. Our worst and best sides are on full display all at once. We may be a mess, but we are invited to root for ourselves, in all our fallen glory. In a hopeless moment, with all the power out, Audrey discovers a cassette in the car and starts singing along to Steve Winwood’s “Valerie” — like the songs that guide our heroes in Stranger Things out of the Upside Down, a touchstone of human love and memory. (Also a reminder to keep your physical media, because you just never know when a solar flare might shake things up.)
I will not spoil the ending, but suffice it to say that Greg’s undying optimism turns out to be well-founded for reasons I wasn’t expecting. And wouldn’t recommend overthinking, because things get pretty timey-wimey and wibbly-wobbly, and once you start actually thinking about such things it’s no fun anymore.
The End of Oak Street never answers the God question. And it never exactly contradicts that Saganism. But even if we are just butterflies in the grand scheme of history, it wants to remind us that butterflies are pretty spectacular. So spectacular, you can’t help wondering what, or who, made them that way.