Anne Hathaway’s new sci-fi dinosaur flick has a weird bone to pick with the nuclear family

“The End of Oak Street” — the sci-fi thriller starring Anne Hathaway and Ewan McGregor that follows a 1982 suburban family as their neighborhood is ripped through a wormhole into a dinosaur-filled prehistoric landscape — is garnering mixed reactions. While critics have been overwhelmingly positive in their feedback, audiences are conflicted, with some praising the spectacle as a fun, surprising throwback and others complaining about plot holes and pacing issues.

BlazeTV host Steve Deace falls into the critical camp, but his complaints have less to do with narrative gaps and uneven pacing and more to do with the “worldview” the film promotes.

On this episode of the “Steve Deace Show,” Deace gives his brutally honest review — spoilers included!

“We have got to talk about the worldview of this film, and since this is not, you know, some cinematic brilliance, I'm fine spoiling it,” says Deace.

His primary issue is the characters.

McGregor plays Greg Platt, a struggling suburban dad who’s secretly working as a pizza delivery driver. Hathaway, who plays his discontented wife, Denise, also has her secrets. Unbeknownst to everyone save her embittered widowed neighbor, she’s been writing a book — but it’s not just any book. It’s a semi-autobiographical novel about a woman who wants to leave her family.

Their daughter is Audry, a cosmology-obsessed lesbian who dreams of going to Cornell to study under Carl Sagan, who famously wrote, “The cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever will be.”

Deace finds this ironic since “[Sagan’s declaration] turned out to be, according to modern science, completely total science fiction.”

“Modern conventional science doesn't believe that anymore [but] believes the universe actually had a beginning and has an end,” he notes.

The family's younger son Brian has his own coming-of-age subplot. He has a crush on the new kid in the neighborhood — a black Catholic girl named Jeanette who, much to his dismay, has a crush on his sister, Audry.

“Can you see some of the seeds getting planted here?” Deace smirks.

When the dinosaurs come out and wreak havoc on the neighborhood, the family’s happy facade begins to crumble.

“Here's what you find out. The dad actually lost his job, OK? But he is so emotionally bullied by the wife that he doesn't have the balls to tell her he lost his job because he doesn't want to take it from her anymore, so he's day-drinking in the garage and delivering pizzas at night to help pay the bills,” says Deace.

Greg, he explains, sneaks into the basement one day and finds his wife’s secret book.

“It's basically her feminist manifesto: Nobody understands me. I'm taken for granted as a woman. I give give give give give. The kids are ungrateful. The husband doesn't love me and cherish me the way that I should. I'm a desperate housewife here, and I want to leave my family and go and find my inner child and discover myself,” Deace summarizes.

Add to that the overlapping crushes between Audry, Brian, and Jeanette, and it’s clear what the film is trying to say, he argues: “Everything in the suburbs is a lie.”

“Your Reagan '80s thing is a lie. The past you want to go back to that you think was taken away from you never was there,” Deace continues.

“Underneath the surface, these women were taken advantage of and wanted to be freed by feminism, and the men were a bunch of wussies and wouldn't provide or do their jobs ... and you're raising sons to be creepers, and the daughters want to expand to their lesbian fortunes, and they're being also inhibited by the strident tyrannical standards of the suburbs.”

But eventually this undercurrent shifts.

“It's girlbosses against dinosaurs until they go up against the Tyrannosaurus rex,” laughs Deace.

“Guess who leaps in to save them? ... The dad! The dad that they all betrayed, they all looked down on, they all thought they were better than, that they all emasculated,” he answers.

“And in the process, he gets bitten in half by the Tyrannosaurus rex and sacrifices himself ... and it's at that moment now the family realizes what douchebags they've really been this entire time, and they just explode in appreciation and tragic sadness for the loss of the dad.”

The film concludes idyllically, with the Platts going back in time through the wormhole to save Greg and the rest of the slaughtered victims.

“The idyllic ending they all get to at the end is the very nuclear family they spent the entirety of the film deconstructing on the way there,” scoffs Deace. “What does this all mean? I have no idea.”

To hear more of his analysis and commentary, watch the video above.

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