Spoiler alert! We're discussing important plot points and the ending of “The End of Oak Street” (in theaters now), so beware if you haven’t seen it yet.
Ewan McGregor enjoys a little bit of everything in the sci-fi thriller “The End of Oak Street.” He gets eaten by a dinosaur in the movie’s most gruesome scene, yet his character still has a happy ending.
Director David Robert Mitchell’s film centers on the Platt family – dad Greg (Ewan McGregor), mom Denise (Anne Hathaway) and children Audrey (Maisy Stella) and Brian (Christian Convery) – who live in a quaint Michigan neighborhood circa 1982. Things get weird one night when the place is rocked by weird lights and the next day, dinosaurs start appearing in the streets and eating residents.
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The Platts discover that their entire neighborhood has been transported, via mysterious wormhole, to the prehistoric era. Greg and Denise are having some marital issues, but everybody needs to put other concerns aside to stay alive with nasty raptors and other hungry beasties around.
Unfortunately, Greg meets a bad fate while the family is in survival mode. To protect his loved ones, he smashes a T. rex-y dino in the face with a sledgehammer, but just as Greg thinks they’re going to be OK, the creature attacks, biting his leg off and leaving him on the ground screaming in agony. Denise and the kids are horrified and have to leave quickly as the dinosaur eats what’s left of the devoted dad.
McGregor likens his surprise death to Samuel L. Jackson getting eaten out of nowhere by a shark in a famous scene from “Deep Blue Sea.” “You just don't expect it and the director chooses a moment where you really (catch) the audience off guard,” McGregor says. “I’ve knocked the dinosaur out and I suppose everyone thinks that the dinosaur's out for the count. And then it just snaps round and gets me.
“I mean, it's a funny moment, I think. And then quite gnarly,” says the actor, who’s gotten a kick out of watching fellow moviegoers react when that scene occurs. “I just enjoyed the fact that I knew it was about to happen and audience didn’t. It made me laugh.”
That’s not the end of Greg’s story, however. Denise and the kids escape this dino-filled landscape by jumping through a wormhole. But in a bit of a “Back to the Future”-style twist, they wind up going back in time, a little bit before the lights flash and everything goes “Jurassic World.”
The survivors get out of the neighborhood so they don't get transported back to the jurassic era again, and knowing that Greg’s out delivering pizzas, Denise uses a payphone to order a pie, thereby getting him also out of the affected area and saving him from being eaten.
McGregor enjoyed the idea of Greg making it out alive so “the mending” of his and Denise’s relationship can happen, he says. Though when it comes to how the ending plays out with different versions of the characters, “it got very complicated for me. I try not to bother about it too much and said the lines, and I'm happy to be there at the end of the film. I'll let the sort of scientists figure out how it works or the quantum theorists figure out if it's possible or not.”
And the Scottish actor reports that wasn’t even the original ending. The “more interesting” initial finale had Denise and the youngsters jumping through the portal and winding up “in the prairies during the settlers’ times,” McGregor says. “They hadn't made it back to their own time, and poor old Greg wasn't there.”
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Ewan McGregor spills on 'The End of Oak Street' ending you didn't see
