Review - Attack the Block

As anyone who has seen his teddy bear spoof movies (Saving Private Lion, Shakesbeare in Love etc) will know, Joe Cornish (the latter half of comedy duo Adam & Joe) has a playful enthusiasm for films. His debut feature, Attack the Block (out on 11^th May), thankfully wears this cinephilia lightly, subtly invoking all the best bits of sci-fi classics like Ghostbusters, ET and Tremors.

But the film is much more than a feature-length collage of Cornish’s DVD collection. The story begins with trainee nurse Sam (Jodie Whitaker) on her way home from a late shift when she is confronted by a group of teenagers from her South London estate. The mugging is interrupted by an alien falling onto a nearby car, and the focus immediately switches to the youths as they confront and kill the beast. Their night isn’t over, though, and their tower block is soon under siege by hordes of much more formidable creatures—or, in the words of the gang, “big, alien, gorilla-wolf motherfuckers.”

By following the teenage delinquents rather than the victimised nurse, Attack the Block toys with the audience’s sympathies and goes beyond sci-fi genre boundaries. The aliens are suitably terrifying without relying on CGI trickery—the creatures’ simplicity is reminiscent of the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man from Ghostbusters. Instead, it is the social world of the kids that is the real story here; a world that ranges from the pressures of petty crime and drug dealing to the everyday concerns of low phone credit and wishing you’d just stayed home and played Fifa.

The attempt to subvert your expectations of what inner-city youths are like deep down may be pushed a little hard at times, but the realistic portrayal of their world blends nicely with the film's sci-fi elements. The South London lingo anchors Attack The Block in the present and fits a classic genre trope. As Cornish explains, “Those kids have their own little language and it’s a sci-fi film, so it’s Klingon, isn’t it? For me, that’s a sci-fi element.”

For all its smart references, the best thing about Attack the Block is its timelessness. If grime culture and extra-terrestrial shock fests aren’t your thing, then there’s still plenty here for you to enjoy. Basement Jaxx and Steve Price provide the score, which complements the story without being overbearingly topical (there is thankfully no Attack the Block rap, for example). The gripping action sequences maintain the fast pace of the plot. It is also brilliantly shot: realistic without being grainy or shaky, and shocking without being fantastical.

Attack the Block isn’t just a wacky sci-fi adventure flick, nor is it a po-faced gritty Britflick. It’s good looking, funny, clever and thrilling fun—everything we had hoped for from the man behind Toytanic.