Looking Back at 2010s Films: Attack the Block (2011)

By Tanner Smith

Joe Cornish’s “Attack the Block.” This. Film. Kicks. Ass!

OK, I’ll admit, when I first saw this British import on DVD, I turned on the English subtitles because the accents were a little too thick for me to understand a lot of the dialogue, and there was a lot of British slang I didn’t get at first either. (Don’t blame me for being a dumb American.) But it didn’t matter; I still enjoyed the film. Then I watched it again; I liked it even more. Then I watched it again; I loved it even more. And I kept watching it again and again and again, and soon enough it became one of my favorite movies!

I should contain myself, but this is a retrospective after all–can’t I be a little excited?

It’s funny because thick accents aside, I can understand why people wouldn’t get into this film at first. The main characters, who are streetwise teenage thugs in South London, are violent, cruel, vulgar, and unlikable. When you first see them, they’re mugging our secondary main character, nurse Sam (Jodie Whitaker), and bragging about how tough they are…or how tough they THINK they are. It’s when the aliens arrive that we actually see them as real, scared kids. They realize they’re hardly a match for these numerous, gigantic, vicious beasts who want nothing more than to maim and kill anyone that they come across. (Btw, how DO these things travel through space? They don’t seem to be that intelligent. It’s like if the shark from “Jaws” was an alien.) The kids are scared; they think quickly; they trust their wits; they perform deeds that they think are so tough before they get a couple of them killed; and so on. As the film continues, these kids do become worth rooting for, which is very important.

By the end of the film, after a night of mayhem and surviving, even if a couple of them haven’t learned anything and will probably stay the same, at least the leader, Moses (John Boyega, a few years before his breakthrough as a defective Stormtrooper), has learned the error of his ways and will most likely rehabilitate himself. And it’s to Boyega’s credit that we can see the transformation through his performance; he’s great here. And so is Alex Esmail who plays pyromaniac Pest and makes for effective comic relief (I love when he’s trapped in a room filled with weed but with no papers).

And speaking of comic relief, there is plenty of that, mostly provided by Nick Frost as a drug dealer and Luke Treadaway as a preppie druggie who has no idea what the hell’s going on until it’s too late to run away easily. BUT “Attack the Block” is also an effective thriller/horror film. The tension builds with each scene, the monsters are nicely-done and pose as a legitimate threat, and there are some good boo-scares (such as when a creature suddenly appears through a peephole).

More importantly, “Attack the Block” is a ton of fun! It’s thrilling, it’s funny, it’s tense, it’s engaging, it’s even dramatic at times, it has good effects, even better acting, the action and characters go well together, the creatures are suitably gruesome, and it’s over in less than an hour-and-a-half. I’ve seen it a hundred times already, and I’ll definitely watch it a hundred more! What else can you say but “That’s a alien, bruv! Believe it!” See? It’s even making me saying those British slang words I didn’t even know were real.