Film review: Attack the Block - out of this world

It’s fun, it’s entertaining and somewhere below action it asks astute questions about race, society and community.

Attack the Block is a gleeful medium-budget London film about a gang of inner city teenagers standing between the south London council estate they live in and a strange, violent species of alien invaders. You may ask, as one of the characters in the film does, “What kind of alien out of the whole wide world would invade some shitty council estate in south London?” The answer, given by one of the boys in the gang — who speak only in a colourful gang-cockney patois — is: “One dat’s looking for a fight.”  And what a fight it’s going to get.

Debut film writer-director Joe Cornish introduces his audience to Moses and the gang of ‘hoodies’ in a scene that sets them up as petty thieves and straight out bullies who mug a nurse on her way back from a late shift at work. It’s quire a risk for a director and/or writer to take; it’s not easy to make an audience connect with characters that aren’t ‘nice’ or instantly likeable. But Cornish benefits from this risk hugely — the film’s teenage actors play their parts with subtlety, revealing new facets of their personalities slowly but surely. Their attempt at mugging Sam, the nurse, goes awry when an alien crashes into a nearby car and attacks Moses. The boys decide to deal with it the only way they know how — with bats, chains, and violence. Slowly, through humour, great character progression and a tightly wound plot, Cornish and his actors are able to lift away the tough exterior of the gang, making them heroes in every way.

The film takes place entirely in and around the block itself, and the events only last one night, moving from the outdoors to closer and closer quarters inside the apartment building. Interestingly, the estate is on Ballard Street — Ballard’s 1975 novel High Rise was about a block of apartments that are cut off from the world and in turn become a microcosm of social polarities, despair, rage and anger. Here too, the block is sequestered from the world, vulnerable to forces that have permeated within in. It can only be saved by those in it — Moses and his friends must protect their turf, set their own boundaries, and find their own redemption, something Ballard’s characters were unable to do. Here, the camaraderie between the gang’s members is rock solid.

Attack the Block is a smart, insolent little film that never wavers and never flags. The editing is crisp and the CGI is minimal but inoffensive — the aliens are large and black with no real detailing except for glow-in-the-dark teeth. It is not the aliens or the threat they bring that carries the film, but an excellent cast of characters. Moses and his gang interact with a drug dealer called Hi-Hatz, his stoned right hand man, another stoned college student/weed seller and the same young nurse they attempted to mug at the start of the film. Of course, like in any action/adventure, they all must come together to figure out how to save themselves and their community. And as in any good action/adventure, they all don’t. Some die, some are maimed, but Cornish barely gives his audience a moment to catch a breath — Attack the Block seizes every chance it can get to slip in a joke, slide in some social commentary, encourage some empathy and yet never, ever loses pace.

In short, this is a near-perfect film. It never tells when it can show, it never uses words when it can use images to move the plot along. All information comes from within the microcosm of the block and its inhabitants, without long conversations and without the dreaded info-dump. Cornish is able to add depth in the way a good director should: with a quiet, brief look at a bedroom, at the clanging metal grill protecting a home, at a simple, ordinary door, a tight little sequence where each boy heads home to collect a ‘weapon’. Though it won’t easily settle into any single genre, this is a small, focused film that knows its own limits. It’s fun, it’s entertaining and somewhere below the action it asks astute questions about race, society and community. As one of the gang asks, “If we was making it up, don’t you fink we’d make up somefin better than aliens?” In this case, Cornish doesn’t need anything better at all.

Published in The Express Tribune, Sunday Magazine, October 16^th, 2011.