This is a barrel of fun, an adrenalized, old-school monster movie made with ferocious commitment by It Follows’ David Robert Mitchell. Setting dinosaurs loose in Eighties suburbia stress-tests the marriage of Denise and Greg Platt (Anne Hathaway and Ewan McGregor), and proves prehistoric predators can still scare deliciously.
We open in a platonic American suburban ideal, filmed with home movie dreaminess. It’s a deliberately Spielbergian scene, reinforced by Michael Giacchino’s sweeping pastiche John Williams/Jerry Goldsmith score; the director and his dark side Stephen King’s fondly recalled heyday have lent an unlikely nostalgic glow to Reagan’s America, exemplified by Stranger Things in the latest imagined bastion of better times. The Three Stooges on the living room TV and vintage Playboys in the garage add layers of fond Americana, while the yearning AOR of Steve Winwood’s “Valerie” plays on the car stereo.
Hairline cracks abound, as Greg moonlights delivering pizzas to make ends meet and Denise secretly hammers out her frustrations in a novel whose heroine has her bags packed. Son Brian (Christian Convery, pictured above left with McGregor) has broken a classmate’s arm, and bickers with mature older sister Audrey (Maisy Stella). A two-million-year-old plant in the back garden heralds more fundamental issues, with TV reports of “unusual ripples in space” and solar flares serving to explain the Platts’ neighbourhood trading places with a patch of prehistoric real estate. Stegosaurs are soon grazing on lawns, giant snakes slithering from pools and Pteranodons picking off the neighbours like leathery vultures.
Mitchell reveals the new reality with a patient slow-burn. Greg is chased by an unseen entity demolishing obstacles on a fence’s far side, long before an Allosaur’s giant head smashes into his car seeking dinner. The Jurassic premise is disturbingly inverted, as a human island is isolated in the dinosaurs’ time: the end of the world, at the end of the street. It’s a neat Twilight Zone notion, born out of the post-war pulp which formed Spielberg to sometimes daffy effect for current audiences (see the often bonkers Disclosure Day). Mitchell follows through with ingenious conviction, forcing suspension of disbelief by establishing the Platts’ ordinary world, followed by breathless mayhem.
The family unit buckles further as dinosaurs shit on the lawn and shag against shaking houses, and humans go on the menu. Everyman McGregor sympathetically plays Greg’s attempt to be the man of the house. Ultimately heroic in his own way, he’s displaced by Hathaway’s feral maternal energy. Audrey, too, adds wisdom to Brian’s schoolboy bravery, while exploring her nascent sexuality with dino-orphaned neighbour Jeanette (Jordan Alexa Davis, pictured second right with Convery, Stella and Hathaway).
High-profile producer J.J. Abrams risks reducing writer-director Mitchell’s credit, much like director Tobe Hooper’s subordinate rep on the Spielberg-produced Poltergeist. The End of Oak Street resembles Abrams’ Cloverfield franchise, along with elements of A Quiet Place and the sundered smalltown microcosm of Stephen King’s Under the Dome.
Mitchell’s own affinity for suburbia and profoundly imperilled loved ones and capacity for dread defined his melancholy horror masterpiece It Follows. Given his head and losing it in Under the Silver Lake's immature if fascinating conspiratorial thickets, he has averted the post-wunderkind fate of the likes of Richard Kelly (Donnie Darko) with this cannily commercial, giddily entertaining comeback. He has convincingly resurrected not only the dinosaur movie but the original thrill of Eighties fantasy cinema, when its fresh escapism could sweep you away.
