SPOILERS
The Platts are sent back in time just after we are sent back in time. The '80s are, just like this [and every] era of dinosaurs, a time that we don't belong in. Unchecked nostalgia is unhealthy. Just look at Trump's slogan, 'Make America Great Again,' or any other fucking 'Retvrn' ideology. Don't move forward; regress, repeat, repeal.
The past is the threat here.
Considering all the geysers, volcanoes, humidity from jungle fauna, and a change in the sun's brightness...they're confronted with literal climate change. So, follow me from there...
What's even more interesting is that the 'progress' that's brought back in time causes serious destruction. It's not a coincidence that this is based in 1982 Detroit, the 'Motor City' at the tail end of the auto industry essentially fucking over Michigan. Hell, that's why the Dad is laid off and working his pizza delivery gig (surely he's one of thousands). So it's not nothing that the fire that ravages the land and displaces dinosaurs is caused by a car. Seeing them flee from the flames means Mitchell is being a bit on the nose [complimentary]. Evoking dinosaur extinction with fossil fuels? It's fucking delicious. Their extinction, our extinction, living in the past, no regard for the future: Fuck!
There's a sense of hopelessness running under every scene. This isn't the Amblin homage I think people are expecting but, rather, a critique of that very thing. I find it kinda funny that J.J. Abrams' name is on this. It'd be like if Chris Hansen was an executive producer of PRIMETIME.
Insert euphoria gif of Maddy asking "Is this fucking play about us?"
My favorite scene is when Audrey goes to the car to listen to Steve Winwood's Valerie and sob. She doesn't wail or scream: she just simply sobs. This teenager is confronting the fact that her future is no longer ahead of her as the 'present' is smothering her. Earlier she had asked her parents if this was the end of the world, if they're stuck here forever, but she was never given a straight or satisfying answer. So the way she steers the wheel with quiet desperation and playfulness for a precious few seconds before letting her hands fall in defeat...it actually took a breath out of me.
It's dawning on her that she's never going to learn to drive, she's never going to college, she's never going to meet her 'Valerie'. Aside from every other reason I've given about this not being a nostalgic pastiche: there's the wonderful lack of overt references or sweaty banter. Anything referential is regional esoterica (like the cans of Faygo or the baseball team in the newspaper). Mitchell is interested in capturing a specific place in time, not the time itself necessarily. It's a personal snapshot so no crowdpleasing 'member berries or Easter eggs to placate us. Well, aside from the giant pile of shit (thankfully, no one says it). But even that shit accumulates and they're perpetually littered with tattered clothes. That's why I love the scene of Audrey in the car so much: this is serious to her. Neither she nor her brother make snarky jokes on behalf of Mitchell hating the premise of his own movie. He makes his characters face it head-on without ironic detachment and that earnestness is very M. Night [complimentary].
And, like M. Night, there's a twist at the end but it's made more interesting by how Mitchell builds up to it.
He accumulates so many shots of portraits throughout, mostly juxtaposed with people dead or in peril in the frame. He also racks up images of people framed in windows. There's even a great shot from inside a house, tracking the allosaurus chasing the family, as we see them passing by windows, but in the foreground is a wall decorated with portraits also passing by in the frame.
He echoes this at the end as we get portraits showing how everyone has changed during the two year time-jump: Brian has a girlfriend, Audrey is dating Jeanette and in College, Denise is a published author...but the last photo is of Greg 1. It's the Polaroid that Denise took of him in front of the mating dinosaurs shortly before he died.
Then Mitchell pans up from this portrait to the family in the backyard having a get-together, framed through the window. So we see Greg 2 along with Jeanettes 1 and 2. It's such a crazy fucking contrast to give us this sequence of growth and change for these characters while we're also meant to confront the disconnect between the two Gregs depicted. Why even keep this photo? It's a memory of someone who doesn't exist anymore and a reminder that this new person... is someone else. Not to mention Denise essentially had to steal him away from an alternate timeline version of her and her kids, likely leaving them to die. Since this is a time-jump it's another instance of us traveling through time. And this time all we have to go on for characterization are snapshots. The frame is limited, the time is past, and these people have changed. ...except for Greg, he's forever stuck in that Polaroid. Greg 2 has no memory of this experience but Denise does.
This wrinkle is what makes the movie for me. Of course I love the tension and suspense of all the dino action but this challenging, melancholic note saves it from just being a Jurassic Park riff*. This ending is also a bookend, considering how eerily similar it is to the opening. We're a BBQ get-together just like the opening block party but we're further removed from it. As immersive as the opening is there's a sense of community that feels false. And that's because it's gradually revealed that everyone is hiding, lying, and withholding from one another. A neighbor even shakes Greg's hand and tells him he's a lucky man because he has such a nice family shortly after the kids voice concerns about divorce. So once the shit hits fan, any sense of community is fucking evaporated. There is no uniting to work together, just mitigating all the lies and opening the misplaced emotions that have been bottled up.
Specifically the scene where the brother returns to kick Brian's ass. How this paid off was such a shock to me. The younger kid in the cast begging his brother to stop, so they can go find their Mom was so unexpectedly sad. It was such a surprising but satisfying note to leave that on considering they're just two parts of this mosaic of catastrophe happening all over the neighborhood. The older brother had reserved all his anger for Brian and it's just been exacerbated by his new circumstances. So to see it explode and Brian isn't able to fight back or get any kind of resolution beyond taking the beating...it was...real. Who know what these two brothers have been through and now the older one sees Brian just roaming around. Of course he's going to pounce and unload that anger regardless of its futility. Just another glimpse into how this community isn't connected in any meaningful way.
And I'm thankful that Mitchell didn't do the typical coming-of-age trope of having Brian become empowered by this situation and use that as a thrust to confront his 'bully'. Because 1) the only reason he's the target of a bully is because he bullied someone and 2) this situation shows just how vulnerable he is. His own Mother does the exact same thing later on as she unloads unprocessed anger at him, after coming down from the shock of seeing her husband die. The image of her walking toward the fire and smog while in disbelief has really stuck with me.
It's Carpenter cynicism filtered through a Spielbergian lens. (I'm also kicking myself because I jumped the gun comparing Bone Temple to Disclosure Day when this would have made more sense)
* I'm not stupid, of course I get the Jurassic Park and Back To The Future comparisons. And even Twilight Zone, yes, obviously.
But what I kept thinking of was Star Man.
Carpenter responded to the poor box office and negative reviews of The Thing (exacerbated by E.T.'s successes) with his version of a Spielberg story. It's about the most sentimental movie in his filmography, about a woman who loses her husband but she's 'reunited' with an alien disguised as him. Gradually she's given a chance to say goodbye to him over the course of the movie as he learns what it's like to be human. But that's inverted in Oak Street. She doesn't have to say goodbye, she just replaces him regardless of what it means for their future. And to think, just earlier, that this timeline's Denise was complaining that her Greg wasn't spending time with her and the kids because he was off making pizza deliveries. This time, he never came back... because of Denise 1 ordering a pizza.
Speaking of unfair criticisms:
I've seen pushback on the use of split-diopters based...solely on the fact that there are split-diopters. I guess they're outright dismissed as purely an exercise in style rather than seen as a stylistic choice with intent. I welcome them because they actually give the conversations weight, the dialog feels more intimate and shared, rather than some standard medium shot/reverse shot.
The biggest complaint I've seen is that
"There was no sense of wonder"
Well, clearly Mitchell wasn't going for that.
To fault a movie for not doing something that it was never going to do...isn't conducive. That's why boxing something in to what you expect and not allowing any room for surprise is just a needlessly limiting way to engage with art. You don't go to the stage play of Glengarry Glenn Ross and complain that they never sang anything from Shrek: The Musical, do you?
Expectations are a trap, plain and simple. If you dismiss something for what it isn't, you're not engaging with what it is. Which is incredibly uncurious behavior that can lead to anti-art dismissiveness and that shit will erode your spirit.
Denise and Greg clash over religious optimism vs. secular realism; he wants to shield the children and she wants them to face reality. She tells him that she doesn't want to lie to their children after he tries to assure them. Meanwhile she's been writing a novel about a woman escaping her life for something more. There's no sense of 'wonder' because Mitchell wanted this to be scary and he achieved just that. Any romanticism of the past would negate the rest of the movie.
