Drive-in Saturday Tuesday Movie Review: The End of Oak Street (2026)

The Drive-in Saturday Tuesday movie review is a seasonal feature in which I review movies I see at drive-in theaters. The name of the segment is taken from the Bowie song, though often the movies have no direct Bowie connection. Part of the fun is finding indirect Bowie connections, and a perhaps surprising number of these movies actually use a Bowie song in the soundtrack or are otherwise related to Bowie. But at the end of the day, this segment is a movie review!

Movie: The End of Oak Street (2026)

Bowie Connection: I really have to stretch it to connect Bowie to this movie, but here it goes: well, the co-star is Ewan McGregor, who also played an Iggy Pop-inspired character in the movie Velvet Goldmine (1998), which was a thinly fictionalized version of Bowie during the Ziggy period. McGregor also performed a medley that included “Heroes” in Moulin Rouge (2001), which also featured Beck covering “Diamond Dogs” and Bowie himself contributing “Nature Boy.” Sadly, he does none of these things in this movie. Also, Bowie was friends with Marc Bolan of T. Rex, and there’s a T. Rex in Oak Street.

Finally, for some reason, this movie is set in 1982, or perhaps more accurately I should say that its human characters come from 1982. The soundtrack features plenty of songs from that era, but no Bowie. That said, Bowie’s “Slip Away” (2002) contains the line, “Down in space it’s always 1982,” and since this movie has to do with time anomalies, I’m gonna say that’s the main thematic connection. No? Well, at least it gives me a song to add at the end.

Experience: We were back at the Malta, where Spider-Man is still getting a bigger crowd on the other screen there. The temperature was a little cooler and the movie started a little earlier. Soon the movies will start early enough that I will be able to make it through the second feature, but we were too tired for that this time…

Movie Review: Boiled down to its essence, this movie is a bunch of people being chased by dinosaurs. If the premise of Jurassic Park is that dinosaurs are brought to life in modern times, the premise of this one is that a cosmic event transports a bucolic suburban neighborhood and all the people in it to prehistoric times. There’s a little more going on, but for purposes of drive-in entertainment, it’s as simple as that. The special effects are good, the pacing is good, and the main stars, Anne Hathaway and Ewan McGregor, are fun to watch.

And yes, this is the third new Anne Hathaway movie I’ve seen at the drive-in this year, the others being The Devil Wears Prada 2 and The Odyssey. This is the summer of Anne Hathaway. Good for her.

I could easily leave it at that, but what fun would that be? But to go deeper, I have to REVEAL SPOILERS. So SPOILER ALERT, don’t go any further if you don’t want to learn some stuff that happens in the movie!

Why 1982?
Though far from the main point of the movie, I have fixated on why the modern-world part was 1982. On the surface, there was nothing particular about that year that advanced the rest of the story. And yet… 1982 was the year of both ET and Poltergeist, both of which were set in extremely similar suburban neighborhoods. Children riding bikes is significant in Oak Street, and it all seems like more than a simple nod to Steven Spielberg (as if the similarities to Jurassic Park were not enough). I think the idea was to import a bunch of associations from those earlier movies into this one. First among those associations is the idea that the superficially peaceful life and environment we construct for ourselves is actually fragile and easily disrupted. So there’s that.

One of the characters, the daughter of McGregor and Hathaway, was a fan of Carl Sagan and Cosmos (1980). Her interest in Cosmos was used as a device to explain what was happening—wormholes were opening up between the present and far-distant past. I strongly suspect that the actual Carl Sagan would have said that these guys were getting it all wrong, but for the daughter, played by Maisy Stella, to have this at the front of her mind enough to offer an explanation, Cosmos would have had to have been relatively new.

An unspoken but conspicuous conceit of Oak Street is that dinosaurs are covered with feathers, or proto-feathers. This is based on a relatively recent theory and at odds with most earlier cinematic depictions of dinosaurs. At one point in the movie, the son character, played by Christian Convery, looks up dinosaurs in an encyclopedia and sees images from the time, which don’t include feathers and are depicted in stances different than what we’re actually seeing.

I also suspect that the filmmakers wanted to avoid questions that would arise from the existence of contemporary technology. As I’m typing this, I’m not sure what those problems would have been beyond there not being an encyclopedia around to look at and that Anne Hathaway’s secret writing project, which was (literally) a deep basement subplot, would have been saved to the cloud.

Was all that enough of a reason to set the modern time as 1982? I feel like I’m still missing something…

The Subplot(s)
The stage is set for the story by establishing that the Hathaway and McGregor characters are having marital difficulties and are on the verge of divorce. We later learn that McGregor has lost his job, which is why he is delivering pizzas for money, and that he’s fallen off the wagon. Meanwhile, the Convery character has made enemies with a neighborhood bully who is established as a looming presence before we ever meet him. Later, the bully encounters Convery as their world is falling down. Dinosaurs are eating the neighbors and a fire is threatening to burn the last artifacts of the modern world transported to the prehistoric one. So the bully starts beating up Convery, before realizing that his priorities are wrong. Along the same lines, Hathaway’s character realizes she cares for and thus loves McGregor’s and, by the end of the movie, their marriage is stronger. The exportable points are that externalities can send us down the path of work avoidance at the expense of what’s truly important. More broadly, existential crisis can help us see the shortcomings of our petty conflicts and bring us together. Monsters suddenly appearing and disrupting an otherwise peaceful community are what the movie is about, but also a metaphor for some of the types of changes we, in 2026, are experiencing right now. The dinosaurs are stand-ins for, take your pick—COVID, AI, Donald Trump.

Oak Street is not a profound movie, but it does more with this than I’m getting at. Hathaway’s character secretly wrote a book about her shattering family life, but the book gets consumed in her flooded basement (thus it is important that it can only have existed as a printed document). At the end of the movie, rather than rewriting the book, she writes a new one titled The End of Oak Street, about the dinosaur adventure. The book becomes a symbol for what the character was working through.

But mostly this is a movie about dinosaurs chasing people.

The Ethical Dilemma OK, so, given that at its core this is more Jurassic Park than Schindler’s List, it has to have a happy ending, right? So the happy ending is this: As more and more neighbors get eaten, and eventually so, too does McGregor’s character, Hathaway, the children and a fourth character use the wormhole explanation to find a way out in the form of a Time Bandits-style temporary portal that flashes in and out of existence. Through this, they make it back to 1982. Not to get off track, but this reminds me of the line from Asia’s “Heat of the Moment”— “now you find yourself in ‘82.” That album has on its cover a dragon that looks very much like this dino-snake creature in Oak Street looking at a silvery ball that kinda looks like the movie’s portal. But I digress.

Anyway, the portal doesn’t just take the characters forward to 1982, but to minutes before the neighborhood gets swapped with real estate from the primordial jungle. So, Hathaway orders a pizza to be delivered outside the parameters of the neighborhood that will be sent back in time, so that McGregor can be tricked into getting out without having to be convinced of an unbelievable story. And then…happily ever after.

Except, doesn’t that mean that the McGregor from this timeline left his family behind? Did Hathaway 1 condemn Hathaway 2 to death? Without McGregor, the sequence of events that led to Hathaway and the children escaping would not have proceeded the same way. We are conditioned from Marvel movies to seeing time-traveling characters encountering other versions of themselves. The moment at which their timelines diverge, they become different people. If you watch the right show and movies, you can see both Thanos and Loki viewing their own deaths, but we also know that we are seeing different versions. Ya know, the Ancient One explains it to Bruce Banner in one of those movies.

Time travel inherently doesn’t make sense. I can basically only think of one main alternative explanation of what happened, which is no more satisfying than the divergent timeline idea. This one is that the moment Hathaway leaves the first timeline, a sequence in time is erased. Sticking with Marvel, this was the implication in the movie X-Men: Days of Future Past. The good guy goes back in time to prevent the bad thing from happening, and the next 40 years just changes. The past as this one character remembers it only exists in his memory, but essentially never happens. The biggest (but not only) problem with this scenario is—what’s the cutoff point? It can’t be from the point that Hathaway and the children jump into the portal, because McGregor would have still died in the past. His fossilized femur might be waiting to be discovered, but also, then, there wouldn’t have only been one McGregor. That takes us back to option one.

But option one means that the version of McGregor going forward knows that his wife and family had been left to die. If not, an endless loop of Hathaways would be falling through the portal, but that also clearly didn’t happen in the movie. The Hathaway that saves McGregor is a different person. At some point, this should occur to McGregor. The ethical dilemma for Hathaway should have been the decision to save McGregor at the expense of her alternate self and family. But saving McGregor should not have brought the family back together. Not that any of this is realistic, but the idea that McGregor haven been taken away from the family he knows, eventually knowing that they likely were torn apart by dinosaurs, should have bred resentment and doomed the marriage.

My own wife thought that I was overthinking it, which admittedly I am.

Rating: Three feathery velociraptors.