Several critics have said The End of Oak Street is the most fun dino thriller since the original Jurassic Park back in 1993 (its Rotten Tomatoes score reflects that, as well).

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What hasn’t been said is why, exactly.

The new film, from writer-director David Robert Mitchell (It Follows) and starring Anne Hathaway and Ewan McGregor, follows a suburban family in 1982 whose neighborhood gets transported a couple hundred million years into the past. Glorious mayhem ensues.

For fans of the dinosaurs-attack genre, Oak Street is such a breath of fresh air that the film throws into sharp relief everything that’s grown stale in the Jurassic franchise, which has owned this beat, curiously uncontested, for decades.

Now, admittedly, using End of Oak Street to try and school the Jurassic team is a bit rich. The Jurassic franchise has made $7 billion globally. The most recent entry, last year’s Jurassic World Rebirth, earned $872 million despite a weak 50 percent Rotten Tomatoes score (only two of the seven Jurassic movies are actually “Fresh” on RT — the perfect-to-this-day original and 2015’s not-aged-well Jurassic World). Rebirth performed a reset of sorts by circling back to tropes from the first few movies — it “refreshed” the franchise by doing the same things we’ve seen before.

Oak Street rather unluckily hit theaters while mega-hits Spider-Man: Brand New Day and The Odyssey are still setting box office records. The film still opened to a rather good $47 million globally (probably not helped by its title, which is fitting and literate but doesn’t really sell what the movie is about).

Below are four ways Oak Street creatively took advantage of Jurassic sameness (some spoilers within, with No. 3 in particular containing major spoilers).

1. Dinosaurs are Scary Again. This is a biggie. Jurassic film franchise creator Steven Spielberg has long balanced dinosaurs as a source of terror with the idea that they’re noble, majestic and oddly pristine looking creatures. But part of what made the original Jurassic work better than all of its successors is that it really leaned into the scares — the iconic T. rex attack on the Jeeps was incredible and frightening. So were those devious velociraptors (“Clever girl”).

Starting with the second film, The Lost World, a theme emerged in which dinosaurs were recast as victims who needed protecting from evil humans. It all started to feel very “save the whales,” with characters constantly preaching about protecting species that don’t actually exist. By the time the Jurassic World franchise rolled around, even velociraptors were reduced to Chris Pratt’s biking buddies.

In Oak Street, the dinos are grimy, weird, scary and only interested in eating you or ignoring you (or, in the case of one hilarious shock moment, having sex — a scene you could never imagine occurring in a Jurassic movie in 65 million years). In other words: The animals are just animals. They’re not making dewy eye contact with characters, and nobody is dumb enough to try to pet one. (Also, in a nice touch, the velociraptors have feathers — accurately — finally portraying them as the murder-chickens they were).

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2. Our Heroes Are Allowed to Really Fight and Not Just Flee. When Spielberg was executive producing Fox’s short-lived dinosaur drama Terra Nova, showrunner Brannon Braga said the show couldn’t maim or kill dinosaurs unless absolutely necessary, a rule which seems to extend to the Jurassic franchise as well. This is a bit like Gene Roddenberry’s Star Trek: The Next Generation rules which outlawed conflict between crew members, something which became a major frustration for Trek franchise writers.

Because if you’re trying to sell the idea to an audience that people are struggling for survival against dinosaurs, your heroes should be willing to do absolutely anything to save themselves — which is how you end up with holy crap moments in Oak Street like Hathaway blasting an Allosaurus in the face with a shotgun, or hysterically stabbing a creature with a knife. In the Jurassic movies, characters are mostly reduced to constantly running away, with only bad guys ever fighting back.

3. The Body Count Is High — And No One Is Safe (major spoilers in this one): In most Jurassic movies, there are a handful of characters with speaking roles who are killed off. Spielberg knows you must prove to the audience that dinos are deadly. The problem is, you can always figure out who isn’t making it to the end credits (anyone remotely unsympathetic, for starters).

In Oak Street, almost an entire neighborhood is killed off, largely off camera, but the film never shies from showing the resulting carnage littering the streets. Just when you think our heroes are going to be safe, the film pulls the rug out from the audience by graphically killing off McGregor’s patriarch in front of his wife and kids. It’s a hugely shocking moment. Granted, the film eventually walks this back, but the reversal feels so cathartic that you actually appreciate the cheat.

4. There’s a Lot of Dark Comedy and Actual Pathos. Jurassic has fleeing moments of dark comedy — the “Objects May Be Closer” mirror gag, which Rebirth dutifully recycled, among others. But the franchise became more earnest and self-serious as it went. Oak Street is stuffed with dark, visual, gory humor. Several scenes really stand out: A ridiculously large, sneaking snake stand, a second family of four being chased by a T. rex across a distant hillside, a moment when the family’s teenage son (Christian Convery) breaks his leg by mistiming an enthusiastic leap to safety.

The comedy is balanced by a level of pathos the Jurassic films also staunchly avoid. The relationship issues in Hathaway and McGregor’s marriage go deeper than the usual estranged couple in a PG-13 adventure movie. A scene where the family’s teenage daughter (Maisy Stella) takes a moment of respite by listening to Steve Winwood’s “Valerie” is every bit as surprising as any dino attack given its level of unexpected emotional heft.

What’s perhaps most impressive about Oak Street (which, it should be noted, counts J.J. Abrams among its producers) is how it manages to give a gleeful middle finger to the “rules” of the Jurassic franchise while still making a movie that feels overtly like a Spielberg film.

Especially with the 1980s suburbia setting, Oak Street feels like its channeling Spielberg, only with his early career edge — the Spielberg that had 12-year-old Alex Kintner being gobbled by a shark in Jaws, a mom nightmarishly sliding into a corpse-filled swimming pool in Poltergeist, or a demonic priest ripping out a man’s heart in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. The film works by remembering the Disney dark ride version of Spielberg that helped launch the filmmaker to fame in the first place.

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