Attack The Block

When a group of feral aliens starts terrorising the denizens of a South London tower block, it’s left to a gang of hoodies and a trainee nurse they’ve just mugged to band together and fight back.

This movie has found considerably more success in the US than in the UK, which is a little surprising.
Firstly it a very enjoyable movie but suffers little from a lack of focus to one genre. Its not scary enough to be a horror, its not funny enough to be a comedy and it lacks enough alien action to be sci-fi but i saying that it does sit nicely enough in the middle of those three genres.

A group of inner city thugs have to defend there 'block' from an alien invasion, the premise is so enticing and as soon as i heard about this i was looking forward to it.
The cast are the highlight of the movie, every member of the gang plays their part perfectly, Pest in particular, who gives a great performance and has a bright future ahead of him. His performance reminded me a little of Jamie Bell.

But its the story that lets these kids down. While not a bad story, and capturing the feel of the block perfectly, fast paced and exciting in parts, the characters have no believable redemptive arcs as you would expect in this kind of movie.
We first meet our 'heroes', a group of young inner city thugs led by Moses, played brilliantly by John Boyega, as they mug a young nurse at knife point and soon encounter and kill an alien that crashes into a car. They proceed to march to the local drug dealers flat all the while parading the dead alien as a trophy. And while at the drug dealers apartment Moses is promoted to a cocaine dealer. Now throughout the movie they encounter the young nurse, Sam, again and are forced to tea-up, in order to survive the arrival of many more, even bigger, fiercer aliens.

Pest: "That's and alien bruv, believe it."

That brings up the highlight of the movie, the aliens. The design and execution of these aliens is amazing. the simple yet original design is the one thing that elevates this movie above average to thoroughly enjoyable.
The design is simple, large apelike creatures that are 'blacker than black' and have large luminous teeth are the best creature design that I've seen in a movie in ages!
But the inability to sympathise with the characters is the movies downfall, and probably seeing youths like this all the time around London is a reason that sympathy is not quickly forthcoming is why the movie was not a s well received in the UK as it was in the US.

While it does try to show us that there is more to these inner city youths than meets the eye, something in which it fails, if it concentrated more on the atmosphere and sci-fi/horror aspects of the movie that were extremely promising it would be a far superior movie.
Despite its flaws its still an enjoyable movie.


6/10