Attack the Block 2011

[7.7/10] I had a hard time getting into Attack the Block at first. It’s not that the film wasn’t well made or well acted. It’s that we meet our perspective characters when they’re mugging a poor, frightened woman and roughing her up when she doesn’t turn over her worldly possessions fast enough. It’s a terrifying scene, one that made my blood boil a little bit when it became clear, after the film got going in earnest, that it wanted you to be on the muggers’ side.

The most impressive trick writer-director Joe Cornish pulls off in the film is not the well-crafted script or impressive special effects or the wonderfully-built horror and tension. It’s the fact that by the end of the movie, you are on their side and so is their victim. It doesn’t come easy. But as the film progresses, you learn more and more about why the kids are like this, the choices they have and don’t have, the environments they grow up in and hassles that come with it.

Those things don’t erase what happens in the film’s beginning, but they explain it. Apologies and youth and understanding become enough to sway you of an inner decency in Moses and his crew that, if fostered rather than stamped out, could make a hero out of a mugger.

With that backbone, it’s hard to pin down a genre for Attack the Block. The best way I can describe it is as The Warriors meets Alien meets Kids meets Die Hard meets Night of the Living Dead.

It is a film about the different crews and cohorts operating in and around the titular block. It’s an alien invasion story, with snarling and fearsome monsters lurking around every corner. It is a frank look at the slang and manner of young men and women getting by despite poverty and a lack of supervision. It is a rollicking action film bolstered by the claustrophobia of it taking place largely in one building. And it is a story about people from different walks of life, forced together by circumstance, finding common cause and common ground in desperate times.

Cornish makes all of those disparate elements work by integrating them all together with vivid characters. His script treats each of the residents and visitors of The Block like wind-up toys, spending much of the first act winding them up and then devoting the rest of the movie to their frantic movement around the game board, bumping into one another. Whether it’s a street gang, stoners, nurses, cops, gangsters, nine-year-old wannabes, a group of young women, or even the alien attackers, Cornish and company mix and match the pieces brilliantly, with humor and sparks flying at each new combination.

Those sparks (often aided by exploding fireworks) dovetail nicely with the impressive set pieces, cinematography, and production design. Attack the Block looks remarkably high quality for a film made with a $10 million budget. It’d be too much to say the film feels realistic exactly, but Cornish and director of photography Tom Townend give the movie a washed out, green-graded, Fincher-esque look that exudes a certain lived-in realism even within the plainly heightened reality of an alien invasion flick.

That’s aided by the look of the creatures themselves. The alien, hulking black masses of fur with multiple layers of glow-in-the-dark teeth, are the perfect antagonists from a visual standpoint. They allow the film to take the Jaws approach, leaving more of the terror to suggestion and expectation, then having to show the beasts full-on. The editing matches that, with us rarely getting a clean look at the monsters, just their bright gaping maws, reading to snap and bite.

It’s no surprise, then, how well Attack the Block works as a horror movie. The kills are doled out judiciously, and the threat level escalates accordingly. Those threats come from both the extraterrestrial pursuers and the ones native to The Block, each emerging to torment our heroes at inopportune and unexpected times, and even running into one another. Through all of these sequences, whether they’re frantic chases, smoke-filled brawls, or daring final stands, Cornish and his team shoot for maximum suspense and heart-pumping investment in everyone’s fate.

The movie also gets some extra juice from being something different than the standard alien invasion movie. Beyond just the clever explanation for the extraterrestrials’ pursuit of the main characters, the focus on a localized, poorer, urban setting distinguishes the film from the globe-dotting, worldwide fare like Independence Day. That gives Attack the Block a more intimate feel, making the menace seem realer and giving the film more space to explore the particulars and real world specifics of that space and those that inhabit it.

That ties nicely into Moses’s story and the broader metaphor the adventures of him and Sam, the woman he mugged, represent here. There’s the sense of Moses at a precipice, trying to decide between rising above petty crime into the hardcore drug world or follow his better angels and become the better person that can save the day (and, not for nothing, earn the approval of his crush). John Boyega, in his film debut, plays the role with a low-burning intensity, that conveys an inner life to the otherwise stoic character.

That is, ultimately, the broader project of the film beyond its alien-infused horror and humor. The audience, like Sam, slowly but surely comes to know of that inner life, and the more complicated and pitiable treatment and circumstances that have made Moses into the person he is and the person he could be. There’s plenty of less-than-subtle critiques of the police and the government who contribute to The Block being the way it is, giving its residents a sense of being under attack long before alien monsters arrived. But they find purchase in an unlikely hero, made all the more unlikely by the way in which Sam and the viewer meet him and, over the course of the film, gradually but firmly come to understand and root for him.