RESOLVING THE LEDGER
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See the full story · 5 sourcesSpoiler Space offers thoughts on, and a place to discuss, the plot points we can’t disclose in our official review . Fair warning: This article features plot details of The End Of Oak Street .
The “butterfly effect” didn’t really start with Ray Bradbury’s dinosaur-hunting short story “A Sound Of Thunder,” but chaos theory and dinosaurs have long been linked in the popular imagination, due in no small part to that piece of sci-fi and to sexy eccentric Dr. Ian Malcolm. Though The End Of Oak Street is no Jurassic Park , most notably in all the ways it handles a family set upon by prehistoric beasts, its ending specifically plays with altered timelines—even if a lot more than a butterfly gets screwed up in the process.
Despite the film having a decidedly B-movie approach to its plot, keeping things simple was never really an option once wormholes and references to Carl Sagan start popping up early on in the Platt family’s sleepy corner of the suburbs. After a pile of dino dung and a long-extinct plant cross over from ancient jungles into contemporary backyards, the whole block gets sent back in time, plopping a collection of hapless ’80s families 80 million years in the past. The main family, the Platts, survives the best they can given the circumstances (and given their refusal to do anything more practical than board up their home’s windows), until they don’t.
In line with the mean-spirited humor coursing through The End Of Oak Street , it was only a matter of time before at least one Platt was going to get gobbled up by a hungry dinosaur. This comes to pass when, after concussing a giant predator with a sledgehammer, Ewan McGregor’s semi-pathetic patriarch Greg pays for a moment of inattention—first with his leg, then with his life. This death puts the surviving family members into a state of shock; Anne Hathaway’s Denise snaps at her children, who’ve been staring open-mouthed at their father as he’s turned into dino chow.
Yet, after a quick crying montage, the film and the family move on. They must: Survival, and getting back to their own time, is key. That latter detail, now that the family has lost a member, becomes an opportunity for some time-logic screwiness. After successfully leaping through an orb-like wormhole, the family makes it back to the future—but they’re not quite actually back at the time they left. They’re a little less than an hour early, in fact. That doesn’t give them a lot of wiggle room to mess things up in a cosmic sense, but it does let them call in an order of pizza, one delivered by their dear ol’ dad Greg (or, at least, this timeline’s version of him).
While the rest of the neighborhood is zapped millions of years away—though news broadcasts in a flash-forward epilogue explain that Denise was able to warn a few others in the community about the impending disaster—the Platt patriarch stays behind…this time. This lets the Platt family become whole again, papering over the parents’ marital rockiness with the traumatic catharsis of watching your drunk and underemployed husband getting his head chomped off. But this easy plot solution also further damns the version of the Platts who get sent back in time sans Greg (good luck, y’all!), and curses the version of Greg that stays behind with the knowledge that his new family has lived through an unspeakable dino-hell (and witnessed his death) while his old family has become some reptile’s latest hot meal.
But don’t worry about all that; The End Of Oak Street sure doesn’t. The film is content to settle for a feel-good ending that waves away any temporal paradoxes, one that uses time travel for simple character purposes, like perfectly deploying the film’s single “fuck” it’s allowed under its PG-13 rating and fulfilling Denise’s dream of being an author. Sadly, this is a huge missed opportunity for an ending that could’ve featured two battle-hardened Annes Hathaway duking it out for control of their dino-free family.
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