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[title]A seemingly perfect family. A marriage going through a rough patch. Two children with secrets of their own. A quiet American suburban neighborhood. And, suddenly, dinosaurs. El final de la calle Oak starts with a premise that is as strange as it is irresistible: a mysterious cosmic event tears an entire suburban street from its surroundings and transports it to an unknown location, where survival will depend on something the Platts had begun to lose: their ability to stay together.
Starring Anne Hathaway and Ewan McGregor, this movie is much more than a dinosaur story: behind the chases and prehistoric creatures lies the portrait of a family trying to reconnect when everything around them is falling apart.
What is El final de la calle Oak about?
At first glance, the Platts seem like any other family. Denise (Anne Hathaway) and Greg (Ewan McGregor) have been married for nearly twenty years and live with their children, Audrey and Brian, in a small suburban neighborhood.
But the normality is only superficial. “The kids have secrets. Greg has a secret. Denise has a secret,” Hathaway explains. That is until something happens that is too big to keep hidden: the entire neighborhood is transported to an unknown environment, and the family discovers that staying together has literally become a matter of survival.
The return of 1980s family adventures
For Hathaway, the film is directly connected to the stories she watched as a child: “It reminds me of those wonderful movies from the 1980s; they were almost like family horror movies. When I read the script, it reminded me of one of my favorite movies from when I was a kid, which I probably shouldn't have seen at that age… but I loved it anyway: Poltergeist,” she explains.
“It’s scary but, at the same time, very wholesome. I love the idea that families can go see it together.” — Anne Hathaway
McGregor had a similar reaction when he first read the script. “It was completely unexpected. It had the spirit of those family movies Spielberg made in the 1980s,” he recalls. And that unpredictability was precisely what won him over: he never knew where the story was going. Until the dinosaurs appeared.
Anne Hathaway and Ewan McGregor: a marriage in crisis amid the chaos
Before facing prehistoric creatures, Denise and Greg Platt are already dealing with their own conflicts. She is a mother of two who, after nearly twenty years of marriage, begins to wonder whether this is really the life she wants. “She’s the kind of woman who grew up in a time when many women went from their father’s home to their husband’s,” Hathaway explains about a character who seeks to rediscover herself while secretly writing a book. She also wanted to steer Denise away from the action-hero stereotype.
To build the character, she looked to Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz as a reference and wanted her vulnerability to make her transformation even more striking: “I wanted Denise to seem like the last person in the world you’d expect to be able to take on a Titanoboa with a knife,” she sums up.
“I’d always wanted to work with Annie. I’ve admired her work for years.” — Ewan McGregor
Greg, meanwhile, is going through a different kind of crisis: he has lost his job but is afraid to tell his family and pretends everything is still normal. “Maybe he’s not as present in family life as we might expect a father to be nowadays,” Ewan McGregor says. For the actor, that tension already made the couple one of the most interesting aspects of the story, even before the dinosaurs appeared.
How the dinosaurs in El final de la calle Oak were filmed
Much of the challenge involved reacting to creatures the actors could not actually see. For Hathaway, that meant working without a familiar point of reference. “I think what’s truly terrifying about these creatures is that they don’t have an off switch. You’re facing a killing machine that evolved perfectly to do exactly what it was created to do,” she describes.
The key, she explains, was trusting the director, the cast, the cinematography team and a movie whose true visual identity they would only discover long after filming had wrapped.
McGregor particularly remembers the physical side of the shoot: he and Hathaway had to run through gardens, sprint down streets, jump over fences and cross yards while escaping imaginary threats. “We had so much fun doing it,” he says. The stunt team worked to make the sequences demanding enough to feel believable without putting the actors in danger.
And then there were the dinosaurs. For McGregor, few things could be more entertaining than “running for your life while a gigantic, relentless dinosaur is chasing you.”
An 1980s neighborhood built from scratch
If the creatures would arrive later, the Platts’ world was very real. Part of the filming took place at Electric Owl Studios in Atlanta, where sets were built with a level of detail that surprised McGregor.
Walking into the family home, he recalls, really felt like stepping into an 1980s house: from the props to what was inside the refrigerator and on every shelf. But the real star was the neighborhood. That long residential street where much of the action takes place eventually became, according to McGregor, “another character in the movie.”
That realism also helped maintain the contrast at the heart of the story: a familiar domestic world suddenly confronted with something completely impossible.
Starbuck, the unexpected hero of El final de la calle Oak
But among Anne Hathaway, Ewan McGregor and a collection of prehistoric creatures, an unexpected contender emerges for the title of the movie’s biggest star: Starbuck, the Platts’ dog.
“Once everyone sees the movie, they’ll understand that Starbuck is the undisputed hero,” Hathaway teases
In reality, the character was played by two dogs, Buzz and Brisket. According to the actress, the first had “one of the most cinematic canine faces” she had ever seen. The second was the action specialist: he could jump into a pool, swim, climb his way out and then launch himself at an imaginary dinosaur.
It comes as no surprise that Hathaway calls him “the undisputed hero” of the movie.
El final de la calle Oak
Cast: Anne Hathaway, Ewan McGregor and more
Genre: Adventure, science fiction and family
Director: David Robert Mitchell
Release date: August 13