I’ll confess to having zero respect for J.J. Abrams. It began with the final episodes of LOST and the clear admission that they never had a clue how they were going to end the thing. It was made worse when he said this in a live interview:
Bear in mind, he was promoting Star Trek, a film he produced and directed.
His esteem took another hit when he admitted to not having a plan for the entire Star Wars sequel trilogy.
So, my skepticism toward J.J. is well earned.
This week, when a power outage blew a four-hour hole in my work schedule, I decided to head to the nearest theater and catch whatever was playing. It happened to be The End of Oak Street, produced by J.J. and written and directed by David Robert Mitchell. Mitchell previously wrote and directed It Follows, which is a well-crafted horror movie. I’d read a few positive posts from mutuals on Bluesky.
So I went in to this movie with mixed expectations.
I can report that this is the worst screenplay I’ve ever seen. The script feels like the result of typing “Draft a screenplay for a Spielberg-esque summer blockbuster with dinosaurs in the suburbs.” I honestly would not be surprised to find that’s exactly how the script was created. From the first frames of the movie we are met with cliche after cliche from Stephen Spielberg’s 50-year-long career.
Here’s what I mean.
The film is set in the early 1980s in a picturesque California suburb where a group of four kids ride their banana-seated bikes from street to street and through their neighbors’ backyards. The main characters are a family of four. A young boy who fears his parents will get divorced, an older sister with hopes of being an astronomer, a mom who’s trying to write a book in secret, and a father who has his own secrets. Into this rose-colored world of nostalgia and unprocessed family trauma, the script delivers dinosaurs.
It’s like a Spielberg highlights reel, as so much of J.J.’s career truly is when you boil away all the lens flares.
If you find comfort in rehashing E.T., Jaws, and Jurassic Park, this may be right up your alley. But you’d be better off watching any of those again. This generates no new ideas and feels like a Large Language Model just regurgitated all of it. It’s classic J.J., whose entire oeuvre is so reliant on Spielberg tropes he can’t see the difference between homage and parody.
Mitchell’s direction is uneven. The scenes with the family are excruciatingly bad. He’s also terrible at directing the young cast members. He seems to really want to be Brian DePalma based on his heavy hand with split diopter shots. The only actor in the cast who isn’t overtly terrible is Anne Hathaway. She seems to accept the assignment is to endure a shitty script, and she commits to it. Her “HOLY FUCK IS THAT A DINOSAUR!!” face is put to good use often.
Ewan McGregor is simply dreadful throughout.
In the end, I wish I’d sat at home in the dark of the power outage rather than in the theater with this absolute turd.
I’m giving this 1 out of 5 stars because the dinosaurs weren’t terrible.
⭐️ ★★★★