Attack the Block

<<

Screening Suggestions

>>

For the most part, people would recognize actor John Boyega as Finn from 'The Force Awakens'. People like me, however, were seeing that John Boyega was cast in a 'Star Wars' movie and thought "Sweet, this guys getting exposure!" See, before he was Finn, John Boyega was Moses from 'Attack the Block'; arguably one of the most badass characters from the last decade. That's personal opinion, but I'll get to that in a while.

'Attack the Block' begins when we see an innocent lady heading home, only to be accosted by a handful of young teenagers. The mugging is interrupted by something falling from the sky and crashing into the car. Eventually, these kids hunt it down and kill it. These little punks are our heroes, ladies & gentlemen!

Before you can say "alien invasion" there's... well, an alien invasion, seemingly localized to the particular "block" these characters all live on. A localized alien invasion? Sounds kinda dumb, I know, but there IS a reason for it that you eventually learn later on in the film. These kids go to kill more of these things, essentially to live out some kind of video game fantasy. However, they find out that there's a whole new set of aliens that weren't quite what they killed in the beginning, and find themselves in over their heads.

I'll take a moment to talk about the look of these invading aliens. Sadly, there seems to be a bunch of people who have seen this movie and didn't like the aliens' design, thinking it was maybe lazy or silly or even stupid. Me? I breathed a glorious breath of fresh air that these things were totally different than what we're used to. They aren't reptilian, they aren't gooey or slimy, they aren't even little grey dudes with laser blasters. These things are make of pitch black hair that's "too black to see", have teeth that glow a brilliant blue-green color in the dark, and they have the form of something like the demon dog things from 'Ghostbusters'... if that's not a good enough description, here's a picture of one. In it's own way, it may look silly, but I sincerely enjoy the fact that the designers of these things kinda just said "screw it, let's make it's teeth glow in the dark, it might add to the fun of it all", and I find it totally does.

But I've talked enough about the aliens, let's talk about our characters. This movie is one of the finest examples of character development that can be squeezed into about an hour and a half. Moses leads these kids, and before we see the title screen you would swear on your life that these kids are just no good at all. They rob a lady, the kill some creature without finding out if it's peaceful or not, and they just have shitty attitudes. In the beginning you're pretty much meant to hate these kids. But by the end of the movie, enough has been revealed that you actually start to feel for these kids, especially Moses. And the lady they robbed? Well, I always found that she plays the audience in this.

I think the single biggest problem people have with this movie is the language. It's not only thick, British accents that are sort of blended with Caribbean, there's a lot of terms that you may not have heard of (at least I didn't before this movie) such as "fam" or "brov". I was even told by a friend who lives out there that, yeah, kids can talk like that, but not as hardcore as they did in this movie. Anyway, it's a language one may have to get past.

On the other hand, the atmosphere, action scenes, soundtrack, stunts, humor, gore, and fact that this is a hard R movie featuring young teenagers kicking alien ass... I mean, think of The Goonies suddenly moving to the hood, turning into bonafide badasses and going up against the Aliens with no Ripley to help them. That's kinda what this is... kinda...

The only way to push this movie any further is to mention that it was written and directed by Joe Cornish; a man also credited for writing for 'The Adventures of Tintin' and of course, 'Ant-Man'. There's really no way around it, you'll either love it or hate it. Rotten Tomatoes ranks it with a generous 90%, while the audience has it at a low-good 74%. I think it's safe to say that at the very least one will think it's "not bad". For me? It's a personal favorite with how utterly unique it really is.

---