Film Development Council of the Philippines chair Jose Javier Reyes has been at the center of a heated conversation on X lately, with people arguing over his latest comments about Filipino audiences and the struggles of the local box office. Much of the backlash comes down to one question: why should audiences be blamed for not supporting local films when so many releases are accused of recycling the same formulas and failing to offer anything new?
That conversation was still floating around when I sat down for a press screening of a Hollywood dinosaur movie. The timing felt almost too perfect. Hollywood recycles plenty of things, too. It just has more money to spend on them.
I had a very specific reason for saying yes to “The End of Oak Street.” When Warner Bros. sent the invitation, the email specifically mentioned David Robert Mitchell, the filmmaker behind “It Follows.” I loved “It Follows.” I called “Leviticus” the best horror film I'd seen since it, so seeing Mitchell's name was enough for me to accept.
I didn't read the synopsis. I didn't watch the trailer. I went in knowing almost nothing about the movie.
The invitation did tell me one other thing: it was a 4DX screening.
I've never liked 4DX. I find the moving seats and assorted physical effects more distracting than immersive. I knew what I was getting into this time, but I spent much of the screening actively fighting the distraction and trying to keep my attention on the movie. The effects made everything louder and more physical, but I kept wondering whether they were adding excitement to an otherwise okay film. By the end, I couldn't quite tell how much of the experience was coming from the movie and how much was coming from the theater.
Then there's Anne Hathaway.
This is the third time this year I've watched her on a big screen, and coming off something as great as “Odyssey,” seeing her in “Oak Street” felt weird. I couldn't quite explain the feeling. Maybe it was the contrast between seeing Hathaway in a movie where she felt completely at home and then watching her here, where she seems to be doing more work than the material around her.
To her credit, she carries this movie. The camera stays close to her, relying on tight shots of her face to sell the tension. She has the kind of presence that can hold a scene even when the scene itself isn't giving her much.
But I didn't buy her as a mother to those kids. I didn't buy her as a wife, either.
The chemistry isn't there. The family doesn't feel lived-in. I never got the sense that these people had a history together beyond what the script needed me to know. That's a problem because the movie wants the family to be the emotional center of everything happening around them.
Instead, Hathaway sometimes feels like Anne Hathaway playing the lead in a dinosaur movie. She's clearly the biggest thing the movie has going for it, but I never fully believed the woman she was playing had the life the movie wanted me to believe she had.
It reminded me of watching Netflix's “The Last House” recently, another disappointing movie starring an actress I really admire. The two films have different problems, but I kept comparing the way their characters respond to danger.
In “The Last House,” the characters want to survive. They're scared and they make mistakes, but there's always an understandable instinct behind what they're doing. You know what they want, even when they go about it badly.
In “Oak Street,” that instinct is harder to find.
Characters make decisions that are genuinely stupid. Not the kind of mistakes you can easily excuse because someone is panicking, but decisions that made me stop and wonder why anyone would do that with giant prehistoric creatures running around.
That's where the movie started getting interesting to me, even if it wasn't always working.
What if I'm judging these characters by the wrong rules?
If “Oak Street” were a straightforward survival thriller, some of their choices would be difficult to defend. You expect people in these movies to learn from what happens to them. They figure out where the threat is, try to avoid it, make plans and change those plans when something goes wrong. They don't have to be geniuses, but their decisions usually have something to do with staying alive.
The people in “Oak Street” don't always behave that way.
Maybe Mitchell is deliberately messing with that expectation. Maybe he's poking fun at the way Hollywood characters are supposed to behave when dinosaurs show up. Maybe he's taking the familiar setup of a family trying to survive a creature attack and refusing to give us the competent, tactical characters we've seen a hundred times before.
I can't say for certain that's what he's doing. But the movie gives you enough reasons to consider it.
For one thing, “Oak Street” doesn't stay in one genre for very long. It moves between comedy, thriller, family drama, and dinosaur spectacle. Sometimes the shifts work. Sometimes they made me wonder what kind of movie I was supposed to be watching.
And that matters when you're deciding how much patience to give the characters.
If this were a grim survival movie, I'd have much less patience for people making obviously terrible decisions. But “Oak Street” isn't really that. It's a family movie with dinosaurs, and the family problems are given almost as much attention as the creatures outside.
That changes the expectations a little.
A family caught in an absurd situation doesn't necessarily need to behave like a team of professional survivalists. Maybe Mitchell is more interested in what happens when ordinary people are thrown into something completely ridiculous. Maybe the bad decisions are part of the comedy. Maybe the movie is taking the conventions of the dinosaur genre seriously enough to play with them, but not seriously enough to obey them.
I could see the idea.
I just couldn't always see the execution.
There were moments when the movie's weirdness felt deliberate and fun. I would much rather watch Mitchell take an odd swing at the dinosaur genre than watch another perfectly competent family run from one dinosaur to another for two hours.
But there were also moments when I stopped wondering what Mitchell was trying to do and simply thought, Why would anyone do that?
That's where the distinction between intentional stupidity and bad writing becomes important. If the movie wants me to laugh at the characters for behaving like idiots, I need to understand the joke. If I'm supposed to be worried about them, I need to care enough about them to be frustrated when they make bad choices.
Too often, “Oak Street” left me somewhere in between.
The family never became convincing enough for the domestic drama to carry the movie. Hathaway does everything she can to keep the emotional side alive, but the relationships around her don't give her enough to work with. The survival elements, meanwhile, are loose enough that I sometimes found myself thinking about the writing instead of the danger.
That's a strange place for a dinosaur movie to leave you.
I went into “The End of Oak Street” because of David Robert Mitchell. I wanted to see what the filmmaker behind “It Follows” would do with a giant Hollywood creature feature, and I deliberately avoided knowing anything about it because I wanted to experience that surprise for myself.
There are things here I appreciate. Mitchell clearly isn't interested in making the most predictable version of this movie. He seems to be playing with the expectations that come with dinosaur movies, survival thrillers, and family films, and I'd take that over another interchangeable blockbuster any day.
I just don't think the movie makes all of those choices work.
The irony of watching it while Filipino audiences are arguing about whether local cinema needs to be more original wasn't lost on me. Hollywood has its own recycling problem. Bigger budgets don't automatically make familiar ideas fresher.
Sometimes they just make the dinosaurs bigger.
And in the case of “The End of Oak Street,” I came away wishing the movie's execution had matched its willingness to do something different.