The End of Oak Street

I enjoyed the hell out of PJ Byrne's role, as I usually do. He is the neighbor, the one they are talking about having the dog eat the balls of, and the one who ends up getting torn apart by the flying dinos on his roof.

And I am a fan of most of the things Ewan and Anne generally do. They have been in some stinkers, which again, most of the time it isn't even their fault. They actually showed up and did their jobs.

It behaves like the writer took every one of their favorite scenes from every movie they ever grew up watching and just smashed them all together.

And there is the Stand By Me reference I was looking for, the "sic balls" bit. They do not actually say the line; they make references to the dog going after the neighbor's balls instead of anywhere else. I was waiting for something of that nature to come around, because the group of kids with the boy all had the same makeup as the Stand By Me group.

Here comes the Stranger Things bike ride over the hill, too. Jesus, these guys have not been able to come up with anything original in I cannot even tell you how long. There is a Dazed and Confused reference as well, the scene where the Ben Affleck character is chasing down the one kid with the paddle. They put it flat on in this one: chasing him around and yelling his name, just without the paddle.

OK, it is the 80s. The kid just said he wanted to watch MTV, which puts it no earlier than August 1981. The houses and clothing still look like the 70s. Maaaaaybe early 80s.

The visual representation of the 70s and early 80s was done fairly decent.

Look at all the "types" of movie genres they got stuck on this thing. Drama, Mystery, Action, Adventure, Science Fiction, Thriller. This is a movie having a crisis about who and what it is.

And for PG-13, they have already shown an old woman mutilated by the velociraptor, and the neighbor killed and picked apart by the flying carnivore birds on his roof. So, yeah. Rating failure, or the scope of what is allowed in the ratings has greatly expanded. The camera did cut away before the really bad shit would have happened, but there was still plenty of noticeable blood between those two scenes.

The CGI is mostly decent. It looks like a mix between CGI and props. I am figuring most of the plants and stuff they have for the prehistoric ones are more than likely styrofoam mock-ups scattered about.

They made a creature crawl through the house and had people notice it at different intervals, like the water thing in The Abyss. That thing did not look like any dinosaur I have ever seen in any book, movie, documentary, or research. Which, that is fine, it is a nonsense bullshit movie, so they can make up whatever they want. It is just that this thing was super out of place in comparison to literally everything else they already put in the movie, so I can only suspect they did it for the Abyss reference, and to let the ILM people have their fun again.

Which is the one borrowed thing in here I do not mind, because the pseudopod in The Abyss was built by ILM in 1989 and ILM did the effects on this. That is a house quoting itself, which is a different act than a writer quoting somebody else's movie.

I do not fault the paleontologist for wanting accuracy in the proper eras of dinosaurs and flora being represented. I am an accuracy nut with history things too, especially when I am trying to write something that is historically accurate.

That being said. This movie isn't a documentary. It's a rhino sized pile of shit that isn't claiming accuracy on any level, so accuracy in lithic time periods doesn't matter. They have got weird bubbles of alternate universes showing up in houses where people interact with their other selves. This movie is NOT meant to be accurate, and I highly doubt anyone involved thought about it for a second.

I also think it is really dumb that they think anyone on earth will believe that humans can outrun a fucking carnivore predator dinosaur.

And Ewan McGregor just got eaten by a dinosaur he thought he killed with a fucking sledgehammer. This movie is ridiculous, and even though I did not pay a dime to see it, I want my fucking money back.

So they jumped through one of those bubble things and it took them back in time to just before the bullshit happened and caused the dinosaurs. They call the dad to make a pizza delivery, and when he shows up, it is like they just forget that there are other versions of themselves down in the bubble thing that they just let die. And then two years later there is some weird TV broadcast showing all the people that died being saved by her calling them collect.

Like, they are just going to gloss the fuck over the fact that they let their earlier selves die just to have the dad back? Ignoring the whole thing that when they killed their earlier selves, they themselves should now be dead and zapped from existence, because that is the rules of fucking time travel?

What the fuck kind of dumbfuckery is this? Even if it is a bullshit movie with bullshit everything, you cannot just decide to change the way time travel works. For fuck's sake.

Again, accuracy is not what this movie is, and yeah, time travel isn't real. But there are still established rules about it through film, TV, and even in certain theoretical astro and physics circles. Time travel is just one of my great loves, so I get pissy when a movie just treats it like filler.

There is a fuckton of big paper reviews that show up in Plex as well, and they all seem to just say the same shit with different words. But the majority of them all use the word "Spielbergian" like it fucking means something. I am honestly wanting to know what Spielberg thinks of this hokey bullshit, since today's critics are saying this pile of excrement resembles his work. Which it 10,000 percent does not, in any way, resemble Spielberg movies.

One of the Plex user reviews is simply: "Imagine you never saw Jurassic Park, and you were stupid." It pretty much sums it up.

So nobody gets me wrong on this. I enjoy the pastiche thing. But if all you are doing is taking from someone else and smashing all of them together, it is not a movie. Not a real one or a good one, because it is not original and you are not trying very hard. It is just tired and boring.

And the thing that makes this worse rather than better is who made it. The man who shot it also shot It Follows and Us. The man who scored it is Michael Giacchino. The effects are ILM. None of these people are the problem. Like the actors, they showed up to work. They just got handed a composted bowel movement and tried to plant whatever flowers they could in it to make it pretty.