In 2026, everyone is chasing Steven Spielberg — even Spielberg himself. The legendary director released his first sci-fi movie in a decade (and his first that felt like classic Amblin ‘80s sci-fi in even longer) to muted applause. And last week, Netflix teamed up with Fast X director Louis Leterrier for a claustrophobic Lovecraftian thriller with Spielberg vibes (and plot holes aplenty). Both of those movies are enjoyable in their own ways, but they pail in comparison to output from Spielberg’s heyday.

David Robert Mitchell’s The End of Oak Street takes an absurd premise of a suburban neighborhood suddenly warped into prehistoric times and turns it into the sort of classic Amblin romp you’d stumble across while channel surfing and wind up watching through to the end. The End of Oak Street more than makes up for a summer without an actual Jurassic World sequel. .

Oak Street stars Anne Hathaway and Ewan McGregor as Denise and Greg Platt, a pair of 40-something parents barely keeping their marriage together. Greg has a not-so-secret drinking problem and he’s delivering pizzas at night to make ends meet. Denise spends her free time writing a novel that brutally spells out her fantasies of abandoning her marriage and children for a new life. Their daughter Audrey (Maisey Stella) just graduated high school and wants to go to Cornell to study astronomy with Carl Sagan, but knows her parents can't afford the tuition. Their teenage son Brian (Christian Convery) has been acting out and smoking cigarettes. There’s also a family dog who for some reason is named Starbuck.

The problems of modern suburbia are thrown to the curb when the entire neighborhood is suddenly transported back in time through a wormhole to an era when dinosaurs ruled the world. Mitchell plays the big reveal with classic Spielberg coyness (only slightly undercut by Warner’s dino-heavy marketing push). At first we just see a prehistoric plant, an inexplicably large pile of poop, a geyser of steamy water bursting from a crack in the sidewalk. Then a large, spiky tail disappearing behind some pushes, a feathery face too big and sharp to be a modern bird. Suddenly Oak Street looks more like Jurassic Park Ave.

The dinosaurs themselves are magnificent, rendered with the feathers and fuzzy hair that we now know dinosaurs sported without losing the fearsome nature imbued by Spielberg 30 years ago. This is a movie where dinosaurs repeatedly slaughter and eat random humans, and each kill got an applause from my theater's rowdy audience every time. Mitchell and his team also take some creative swings with the creature designs that largely pay off, including a family of large rocky turtles and a terrifying silent serpent as long as a train with rows of impossibly sharp teeth.

The humans, however, are somewhat less impressive. Hathaway and McGregor are both as charming as ever, but the chemistry between them never clicks. Their daughter Audrey mostly exists to drop exposition about quantum physics and wormholes, which never amount to much of anything beyond the most hand-wavey exposition since the Avengers “explained” time travel. Meanwhile, Brian is perhaps the weakest of the Platt clan, set up to be a rebel teen but never doing much of anything besides complaining and crying. The displaced neighborhood is otherwise made up of two-dimensional supporting characters like the '80s bully, the cute girl who just moved in down the straight, and the annoying neighbor. Mitchell plays with the conceit that these archetypes matter less in a crisis like this one (the bully breaks down in tears mid-attack), but never digs deep enough to make a resonant point.

Maybe that’s because Mitchell already proved he could do great character work in It Follows and Under the Silver Lake, and his focus here is entirely on the spectacle of these big hulking behemoths and their world. In that effort, he succeeds. The pieces for a great Spielberg adventure are here, but they're never assembled in the perfect, most poignant order. Thankfully, you won't care when the Platts flee from one suburban set-piece to the next is this much fun.

Oak Street gestures at an explanation for its wacky premise, leading to a final sequence epic enough to smooth over any flaws or blemishes. At one point in that final stretch, the guy next to me, who had announced before the movie started that he was in a bad mood and expected to hate it, raised two hands up above his head in triumphant glee at a moment that can only be described as pure Spielbergian bliss. (Spoiler alert: a heroic dog was involved.)

If the summer of 2026 has taught us anything, it's that nobody can truly recapture the magic of classic '80s Spielberg, not even the man himself. But if The End of Oak Street proves anything, it's that you can still get pretty dang close.

The End of Oak Street premieres Friday, Aug. 14 in theaters.