Attack the Block
Feature Film | Joe Cornish
This efficiently localized take on alien invasion is suspenseful fun.
Attack the Block is a hip urban science-fiction flick with old-fashioned values. First-time writer/director Joe Cornish plays a neat trick on his audience by opening the film with Sam (Jodie Whittaker), a pretty young nurse who gets mugged as she is walking home through a rough South London neighborhood. Coming in cold, we might assume that Sam is the focus of this story, but it's quickly clear that the feckless young punks that mugged her are our heroes. When the group's leader, Moses (John Boyega), is attacked by a strange creepy little creature that falls from the sky, he takes it upon himself to kill it. Before long, a wave of much bigger, more fearsome creatures sets upon the local housing estate, with Moses and his crew determined to defend their home. Cornish's clever film captures South London, with its drug lords, marijuana-buying tourists, and gentrifiers. While the funny and tautly suspenseful movie never slows down, Cornish manages to subvert our expectations and comment on the class and race issues the story brings up in an entertaining way. By rooting the alien attack in such an unusual and specific milieu, he makes the tropes of the siege-style horror film feel fresh again.
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