Attack the Block

The début film of Joe Cornish, is an intelligent, low-budget, alien invasion picture set in a South London council estate on Guy Fawkes Night. Though produced, developed, and edited by members of the team that gave us Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz, and Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, this film is more John Carpenter homage than Edgar Wright imitation—which is a good thing in my book. The plot revolves around a teenage street gang whose typical night of mischief is interrupted by hostile space creatures with glow-in-the-dark teeth. What sets the film apart from countless other genre exercises and Evil Dead rip-offs is the acute social commentary that's artfully layered throughout the picture’s lean 88 minutes of monster fighting.

There’s far more enjoyment to be found in celebrating old genre tropes directly through the eyes of contemporary teen and preteen protagonists in Attack the Block than in observing the period-rendered "movie kids" of  J.J. Abrams’ mega-budgeted Super 8 (released the same year), and there’s far less pretentious and overwrought attention drawn to its themes and subtext than in Neill Blomkamp's District 9 (2009). Attack the Block never rises above its modest B-movie aspirations, and Cornish’s writing and direction often come across as sloppy. The film has some great moments of action but also misses several opportunities for the kind of brilliantly staged set pieces that made the early films of Carpenter, Sam Rami, and Toby Hooper so memorable—I don’t feel the desire to return to Attack the Block over and over again, as I did with those earlier films, but that may have as much to do with my age as with the film’s shortcomings. Attack the Block never panders to the audience or critics; it simply lets its contained, well-paced, and insightful action story lose and lets the viewer take from it what we find, not what we bring to it ourselves.