When I first saw Attack the Block, I’d made up my mind before even seeing it that I was going to love it because I am such a fan of writer/director Joe Cornish. (Stephen!) Having now watched the film for a second time and this time and ignoring my love of Cornballs Cornish I still found that I enjoyed it a lot.
The film is set on a South London Council Estate and follows a group of local teenagers over the course of a single night during which they are subject to an alien invasion. The film begins with them mugging a nurse (Jodie Whittaker) as she walks home from work. From there the gang discover an alien, destroy it and parade around the block showing off their kill. What they fail to realise however is that their alien is only the first of many and the others will be looking revenge.
The film is shot and directed so that the audience feels like they are watching an alien planet or space ship and not a council estate. Cornish uses unusual angles to give the tower blocks the look of space ships from the outside and an alien space station from the inside. The effect is to give the film an eerie, other worldly look which is appropriate for the subject matter. The aliens themselves are well designed and look real enough to be scary but not too real as to escape from the 80s feel that Cornish was aiming for. The whole film is like a love letter to the Spielberg esque monster movies of the 1970s and 80s. Their ultra black fur and luminous blue teeth are an impressive creation and their parcours style movement is both scary and unnerving.
The acting on the whole is impressive. Whittaker gives a good performance as the terrified nurse, Nick Frost is on hand to play the shlubby local drug dealer and Luke Treadaway is impressive as a middle class student who tries to use slang to fit in with the teenage thugs turned heroes. The teenagers themselves are all well defined and written. The slang they use feels real and unforced and while some lines are a bit cheesy, on the whole they sound like real South London teens. Their acting is also very good and together they seem like a real gang rather than actors thrown together to make a film.
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| 'Check yo' self blood or we murk you innit' |
My only real problem with the film is that despite their partial redemption, I still found the majority of the gang unlikeable. In the films opening scene we see them mug a nurse at knifepoint and they are responsible for the alien problem too so it is hard to feel love for them. Cornish tries to combat this by showing us inside the leader, Moses’ world and perhaps letting us in on why he is how he is, but it isn’t enough to forgive him for the malicious acts he commits during the film. This however doesn’t detract from an otherwise fine film which is a fantastic debut by Joe Cornish and proof that Britain can handle sci-fi B-Movies as well or if not better than their American counterparts.
8/10
