SPOILERS
The Platts are sent back in time just after we are sent back in time. The '80s are, just like any era of dinosaurs, a time that we don't belong in. Unchecked nostalgia is unhealthy, just look at 'Make America Great Again' or any other 'RETVRN' ideology. Don't move forward; regress, repeat.
The past is the threat here.
What's even more interesting is that the 'progress' that's brought back in time causes serious destruction. Let me explain: Considering all the geysers, volcanoes, humidity from jungle fauna, and change in the sun's brightness...the town of Flowervale is confronted with literal climate change. So, following from there...
It's not a coincidence that this is based in 1982 Detroit, the 'Motor City' at the tail end of the auto industry economically fucking Michigan over. Hell, that's why Greg is laid off and working his pizza delivery gig (surely he's one of thousands). So it's worth noting that the fire that ravages the land and displaces the dinosaurs is caused by oil from one of those cars AKA fossil fuels. And seeing dinosaurs flee from an inferno immediately evoked extinction in my mind. It's actually fucking delicious how Mitchell combines all these ingredients: dino extinction, our extinction, living in the past, having no regard for the future, the auto industry, and climate change all within Reagan-era suburban America. Goddamn.
So this isn't the Amblin homage I think people are assigning but, rather, a critique of that very thing. I find it really funny that J.J. Abrams' name is even on it, let alone all over the marketing. 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?"
Giacchino's excellent score is the most Amblin/Zemeckis/Donner shit ever but it felt so saccharine that I was put off by it. It's creepy because it goes beyond cloying right into outright sonic coercion. Mitchell wants us to feel a specific way that's not going to sustain itself — the other shoe will drop.
And just as I suspected: there's a sense of hopelessness under every scene. My favorite example is when Audrey goes to the garage to listen to Steve Winwood's Valerie and cry. And 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 her new 'present' is surrounding 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 steering 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'. All of Mitchell's characterizations are like this across the board: subtle and intimate.
Another reason I don't think this is a nostalgic pastiche is the wonderful lack of overt references and sweaty banter. Anything referential is regional esoterica (like the cans of Faygo or the baseball team in the newspaper). Mitchell is personally interested in capturing a specific place in time, not just the time itself. So no crowd-pleasing 'memberberries or Easter eggs. Well, aside from the giant pile of shit (thankfully no one says the thing). And as more shit accumulates every pile is littered with tattered clothes so even that joke sours into something darker.
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 undercutting with ironic detachment and that earnestness is very Shyamalan [complimentary].
And, like M. Night, there's a twist at the end but it's made more interesting by how Mitchell builds to it.
He stacks 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 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 which confirms the existence of everyone's multiple selves. 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. And! since this is a time-jump it's another instance of us traveling through time. But this time all we have for characterization are merely snapshots. The frame is limited, the time is past, and these people have changed. ...except for Greg, he's forever stuck in that Polaroid. The one we know, anyway.
Denise and Greg had previously clashed over religious optimism vs. secular realism; he wanted to shield the children and she wanted them to face reality. She tells him that she doesn't want to lie to their children after he tries to assure them that things will probably work out. Meanwhile she's been writing a novel about a woman escaping her life for something more. So the ending where she and her kids are living a lie with their new Greg breaks this wide open. She doesn't confront reality and sit with it, she just replaces him.
And 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 discuss concerns about potential divorce. So once the shit hits the 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 stuck with me.
The way that whole scene plays out is fucking excellent but especially her big blow-up. It's so ugly but in an authentic way I wasn't expecting here. Which, again, makes the inauthenticity of the ending stand out.
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 after it ended I kept thinking of Star Man.
Carpenter responded to the poor box office and baffling negative reviews of The Thing (exacerbated by E.T.'s successes) by flexing on Spielberg with the most sentimental movie in his filmography. It's about a woman who loses her husband but she's 'reunited' with an alien piloting his cloned form. 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. She sacrifices another version of her for a chance at not having to confront her pain.
The idea that this is purely nostalgic has even made people dismiss its filmmaking. I've seen pushback on the use of split-diopters based solely on the fact that this movie has split-diopters. I guess they're outright dismissed as purely an exercise in style rather than discern it as an intentional aesthetic decision. 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 that feels uninvolved.
But the biggest complaint I've seen is frustration that it wasn't nostalgic enough.
"There was no sense of wonder"
Well, clearly Mitchell wasn't going for that.
There's no sense of 'wonder' because Mitchell wanted this to be scary and reflective and he ultimately achieved that. Any romanticism of the past would completely negate the rest of the movie.
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