What if murderous aliens landed on earth, but instead of poising themselves over the world’s capitals in a fleet of giant spacecraft they crash-landed in a south-London housing project?
The answer begins with a group of masked youths accosting a woman on her way home down a dark street and robbing her at knifepoint. Anything more is forestalled by an apparent meteorite falling out of the sky and destroying a nearby car.
Attack the Block 
Directed by Joe Cornish |
But when a likely extraterrestrial emerges from the wreckage and wounds their humourless leader Moses (John Boyega), Pest (Alex Esmail) and the rest of the crew don’t run, they take up their arms and promptly beat the creature to death for its arrogance.
Since anything involving the “feds” – even astrobiology – is a non-starter for these kids, they drag the creature’s corpse to the marijuana grow room of their dealer, Ron (Nick Frost), for safekeeping, only to witness scores more of the meteorites crashing to earth outside while Ron’s other customer, a zoologist named Brewis (Luke Treadaway), hypothesizes about the aliens.
For Moses, Pest, et al, the logical reaction to the new arrivals is to “tool up” with knives, fireworks, and a samurai sword, and set out to bag some more alien trophies.
But unlike the gang’s first, dog-sized conquest, the newcomers are as large and vicious as angry gorillas – hairy, eyeless, deerhound-sized beasts with rows of glowing fangs which happily stymy the usual classification of aliens as Little Green Men, insectoidal, or technological – setting into motion a high-stakes game of hide and seek.
When police and military retaliation fails to materialize, Moses decides it is up to him to keep his friends and himself alive, accepting that it was he, however inadvertently, who set everything in motion by inciting the mugging.
Though the plot leaves little time – and the rollicking, comedy-infused tone hardly any room – for moralizing, Attack the Block has something to say about the cycle of violence as it exists in such environments without any help from aliens, and the way a few violent thugs can affect the experience (and treatment) of an entire community.
Human solidarity is at the root of it, as usual for an alien invasion movie. But director Joe Cornish complicates the idea with shifting, overlapping layers of loyalty based on race, class, age, and clique that illuminate the simple ideals of coexistence and survival linking all of them together.
Hence the gang’s subsequent discovery, while outrunning a pack of hungry aliens, that their initial mugging victim (Jodie Whitaker) is not only their neighbour in the block but a human being with a name – Sam – and nursing credentials that make her valuable to their intended survival.
Only vaguely hampered by the fact that its major characters are as unsympathetic as they are refreshingly distinct, Attack the Block overcomes a few lapses of logic (mostly revolving around one crazy, stand-out bad-ass) to stand as one of the most thoroughly entertaining films of 2011 so far.