I’ve long had mixed feelings about J.J. Abrams. Granted, a lot of my reservations about him can be traced back to recurring collaborator Damon Lindelof (that overrated hack) and his increasingly bad deal with Paramount. But now the Mission: Impossible series is finally over for the foreseeable future and Bad Robot has finally split from them to set up shop at Warner Bros.

Just in time for WB to sell to Paramount. And the Bad Robot HQ to shut down for a move to NYC. Shit.

Anyway, here’s The End of Oak Street, in which Abrams teams up with writer/director/producer David Robert Mitchell. The guy who’s still primarily known for It Follows, a prestige horror film with fantastic atmosphere and piss-poor world-building. Also, that film was 12 goddamn years ago.

The film was made and marketed on the simple premise of a neighborhood that inexplicably gets picked up and dropped in the middle of some time warp and now there are dinosaurs running around. Right away, I saw a problem: What’s the endgame? Seriously, I want to know how these characters could plausibly get back to where and when they came from, or find some means of survival beyond the runtime.

So, what we’ve got here is a fascinating initial premise with an uncertain end goal. And it’s J.J. Abrams producing. Yeah, this could’ve gone all manner of wrong.

Luckily, the solution turned out to be surprisingly straightforward: We got into this mess through contrived bullshit that’s never explained, and we get out of this mess with contrived bullshit that’s never explained. This is a plot built entirely out of contrived bullshit that’s never explained. (Par for the course with Mitchell.) That established, let’s take it from the top.

We lay our scene in 1982, in an idyllic suburban neighborhood. Ewan McGregor plays Greg Platt, a man struggling to hold his family together through recent setbacks in his career and finances. His wife (Denise, played by Anne Hathaway) is an aspiring novelist who recently finished a story about a woman leaving her husband and family. With suspicious resemblances to her actual life. And she hasn’t mentioned her book to her family.

Then we have their kids. Audrey (Maisy Stella) is a social misfit because she’s a budding astronomer who idolizes Carl Sagan, and she’s upset because there’s no money for her to go to Cornell. The other kid is Brian (Christian Convery), a cluster of hormones, unrequited crushes, pranks with his best friends, and ignorant bad decisions in general. I might further add that Brian is tightly attached to the family dog in a way that clearly shows he hasn’t come to terms yet with the concept of death.

Anyway, after a couple of minor isolated incidents, the entire neighborhood gets sent back millions of years to a time when dinosaurs roamed the earth. To be clear, these aren’t the reptilian dinos of Jurassic Park, these are the more modern avian dinosaurs. Thus we have a family struggling with physical/mental breakdown as they deal with excrement jokes, sex jokes, a few select curse words, and the occasional dismemberment. All it needs is an R-rating and this movie would be an Aristocrats joke.

To the filmmakers’ credit, the dinos don’t spend every second of screentime as ruthless killing machines. Though of course the main attraction here is in the chase scenes and action set pieces and so on. Even so, there are some neat moments of comic relief in the fact that these dinos will shit and fuck at any opportune place, just like any other animal. Of course that’s in addition to the satisfaction of watching human hate sinks (most notably Mel, played by P.J. Byrne) getting ripped apart.

But let’s get back to the central premise. What we’ve got here is a family stuck in their house, hiding from the force of nature that’s killing everyone else, with no idea what’s going on or how anything could possibly get back to normal. We even get a scene of Greg and Denise at loggerheads because they can’t agree on how useful it is to stay optimistic.

In summary, what we’ve got here is a COVID allegory. But of course it’s not a perfect allegory. For one thing, dinosaurs are a visible and tangible threat. For another, our characters don’t have water or heat or electricity or any kind of contact with the outside world.

Though we do get a brief scene of Brian flipping through a book on dinosaurs. It’s a shame nothing was ever done with that. Imagine if he became the resident “expert” on dinosaurs, though his knowledge is unreliable at best, as our analogue for the rampant COVID misinformation. But I digress.

The point stands that the only characters here with any real dimension are the parents. All the other adults in the cast are either cardboard cutouts or plot devices. And while the child actors are all doing well with what they’ve got, I’m sorry to say all the young characters are one-dimensional at best. I’m at a loss to remember anything interesting about any of the adolescent characters, or anything productive that they did. The best I’ve got is Brian endlessly whining about his damn dog, and his pathetic ineptitude at archery.

We’ve known for a long time now that Abrams loves paying homage to Spielberg films of the 1980s (see also: Super 8), and The End of Oak Street absolutely falls under that heading. It’s a quick and disposable crowd-pleaser that lives and dies on its premise of a modern family struggling to survive against giant CGI dinosaurs. The film has nothing else to offer, except for some deceptively strong performances from McGregor and Hathaway.

Then again, I can respect a film that knows exactly what it wants to be and puts all effort toward delivering exactly that. I can also respect a film that delivers huge CGI spectacle without any kind of attachment to existing IP, and with zero chance of ever yielding a sequel. Yes, I’m disappointed that the script was so thin and more wasn’t done with the premise to deliver on any kind of more coherent theme. But given the established limitations and tendencies of Abrams and Mitchell, maybe asking more than this wasn’t reasonable.

Ultimately, the film is okay. A second-run viewing feels right for this one.