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When aliens invade a South London council estate, who better to lead the fight than the local teenage gang? Such is the idea in Joe Cornish’s debut feature Attack The Block, an entertaining and sympathetic portrayal of London’s much-maligned youth, as they fend off an alien invasion of their home tower-block.
The film begins with young nurse Sam (Jodie Whittaker) being mugged by a gang of BMX-riding, hoodie-wearing teens. The theft is interrupted, however, when an alien falls from the sky and crashes into a nearby parked car. As always, these are no friendly aliens, as leader of the gang Moses (newcomer John Boyega) finds out as it slashes out at his face and runs away. Offended, Moses chases after it and kills it, subsequently wearing its corpse as a badge of honour with his gang around their council estate. But their glee is cut short as they learn that that alien is not the last they will confront that night...
Attack The Block is a fun film, as we’ve come to expect from the Big Talk Productions team behind it, who have in the past brought us similarly funny and entertaining films in Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, Hot Fuzz and most notably Shaun of the Dead. But here usual director Edgar Wright and actor Nick Frost take a back-seat, allowing Joe Cornish (most famous for being Joe in ‘Adam and Joe’) and his young cast to take the reins.
Above all Attack The Block is a comedy; most lines are eager to make us laugh, and more often than not succeed in doing so. Cornish smartly presents the youthful gangster-speak, and much of the humour comes from playing with their language and culture in the alien-invasion context (‘This is too much madness for one text!’ stresses one of the gang members attempting to text his mates amid the confusion).
The action sequences too are entertaining, especially the firework-fuelled climactic scene, aided by the canny use of slo-mo. Neither does the film go on for too long (unlike Hot Fuzz), as it ends before the constant action becomes exhausting. The aliens are effective, resembling particularly dark primates with particularly bright teeth (described in the film at various points as an ‘Orang-utan-type-things’, 'big-gorilla-motherf***ers’ or more simply as ‘dem tings’).
But underneath all this, Attack The Block functions as social satire. As pointed out by one of the gang members, the police are nowhere to be seen as their tower block is battered by the invading aliens, leaving the residents to fend for themselves. After the coldness of the opening mugging scene, the film tries to make us sympathise with these youths by emphasising just how young they are, and how society has let them down (drawing parallels with A Clockwork Orange).
Whether it succeeds in doing so is debatable, but as a simple 'youths vs. aliens' flick Attack The Block is great cinema. These kids may have 99 problems, but aliens ain’t one.
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