Attack the Block (2011) | Sci-Fi Saturdays

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Yo, these aliens ain’t so tuff, bruv!

Attack the Block is a refreshing and subdued alien invasion film containing unexpected heroes, with thoughtful insight into social disparity and pre-judging individuals. It received additional notoriety several years after its release as two of its actors signed on to popular sci-fi franchises.

First Impressions

In London’s toughest neighborhood, an alien crash lands into a car where a young street gang attacks and kills it. More meteorites hit nearby. One stoner thinks it’s just fireworks, but a member of the gang says it’s an alien invasion as another gang member gets excited that he’s gonna kill them! They grab makeshift weapons and head out, only to realize these new aliens are bigger. They retreat back into their apartment complex, where the creatures come for them through the windows and doors. Two young children also hunt the aliens with a Super Soaker. What would you do when these creatures Attack the Block?

Presented below is the trailer for the film.

The Fiction of The Film

Sam (Jodie Whittaker), a young nurse, is walking home from the tube station on Guy Fawkes night when she is accosted by a group of young thugs led by Moses (John Boyega). She escapes when a meteorite crashes into a nearby car, distracting the gang. Inside the vehicle, Moses finds a dog-sized alien creature, which he kills after it scratches his face. They drag the creature back to their Block, a South London council estate, and ask Ron (Nick Frost) if they can keep it in his “weed room.” Drug dealer Hi-Hatz (Jumayn Hunter) agrees to Moses’ request and recruits him to be one of his distributors.

The group of boys sees more meteorites fall around the city, which excites them. They grab weapons–from swords to fireworks–and ride off on their bikes to kill some aliens. Moses is pinched by the cops due to Sam reporting her robbery and identifying him. As the two officers get Moses into their van, they are attacked by large, simian-sized aliens with glowing fangs. Dennis (Franz Drameh) steals the police van before Moses can be killed. Sam screams at them to let her out, believing she’s being kidnapped. Dennis drives the van into the Block’s underground garage, where they run into Hi-Hatz’s car. He and his bodyguard, Tonks (Selom Awadzi), get out to accost the youth, when Tonks is attacked and killed by an alien.

Sam runs away, while the boys re-enter their building like nothing happened. A dark, hairy alien begins charging them as they enter, forcing Biggz (Simon Howard) to hide in a dumpster outside. The creature busts through the front door of the building, biting Pest (Alex Esmail) in the leg. They bust into a first-floor apartment to avoid the creature and realize it belongs to Sam. Jerome (Leeon Jones) remembers seeing on her ID that she was a nurse, so he threatens her semi-politely to fix up Pest. She grudgingly applies bandages when the creature busts through the door. Moses decapitates it with a sword. Sam realizes that the kids were not joking about the danger and goes with them.

The group works their way upstairs to Tia and Dimple’s (Danielle Vitalis and Paige Meade) flat, where they come up with a plan. The girls don’t believe that the group is being attacked by aliens until two break through the balcony window. Dennis is killed, and Sam saves Moses by killing one of the aliens. The girls kill a second in their bedroom with an ice skate. Outside, two young boys, who want to join the gang and be called Probs (Sammy Williams) and Mayhem (Michael Ajao), see dozens of creatures climbing the outside of the Block. The remaining gang members and Sam head to Ron’s weed room, using fireworks to ward off creatures in the hallway.

In the smoky hallway, Jerome gets disoriented and is attacked and killed. Once inside Ron’s secure apartment, they find that Hi-Hatz is already there. He believes Moses is making a play for his business and threatens the boy. Multiple aliens break in and tear Hi-Hatz apart. In the locked weed room, Ron’s friend, and stoner, Brewis (Luke Treadaway), notices in the UV light that Moses has something on his clothes. He postulates that it might be pheromones from the alien they killed, and it’s attracting the male aliens towards the group. They formulate a plan, and Moses takes responsibility for his actions.

Ensuring that Sam’s clothing is clean, she sneaks into Moses’ apartment and turns on the gas. Moses runs downstairs carrying the female alien with him, which draws all the other aliens after him. Once inside his apartment, he sets off a firework, which causes the flat to explode. The aliens are killed, and he is blown out the window but manages to grab onto a flag hanging on the balcony. Moses, Pest, and Biggz (who escapes from the dumpster with help from Probs and Mayhem) are arrested. When the police ask Sam for a statement, she says these boys live in her building and protected her. The crowd begins to chant Moses’ name.

“First they sent in drugs, then they sent guns and now they’re sending monsters in to kill us. They don’t care man. We ain’t killing each other fast enough. So they decided to speed up the process.” – Moses

History in the Making

Attack the Block was the directorial debut for Joe Cornish, a British writer and director. He had previously written the screenplay for Steven Spielberg’s animated film The Adventures of Tintin, as well as penning the original draft of the story that would become Marvel’s Ant-Man film. As a debut science-fiction film, Attack the Block received a lot of buzz with reviewers comparing it to Neil Blomkamp’s District 9 from two years prior. Not that the two films are alike, but more in regard to the ability of these first-time directors to create such an engaging and interesting tale about aliens visiting the planet. District 9 plays on the angle that the aliens are immigrants to the planet, which saps the resources of the country. It also works as a social commentary on the perils of racism and the classism inherent in South Africa. Attack the Block is not as political a film (though it does address the classism and racial tensions of low-income residents in South London), but it creates protagonists in the unlikely characters of an urban street gang whom the audience is asked to sympathize with. Cornish also pulls ideas for his film from previous British science-fiction stories.

The film received renewed interest during the mid-2010s when two of its actors were picked to appear in two of the most popular sci-fi franchises of all time. John Boyega, whose first feature film was Attack the Block, was cast as Finn–an ex-stormtrooper–in Star Wars: The Force Awakens. Meanwhile, Jodie Whittaker, who had done several films and television projects before and after Attack the Block, was cast as the 13th incarnation of (and the first female incarnation of) The Doctor in Doctor Who. Both casting announcements were important steps forward in science-fiction roles in the early 21st Century, and this film, the actor’s early work, was brought up repeatedly, especially with Boyega.

Genre-fication

In the genre of sci-fi alien invasion films, Attack the Block takes a lot of what has come before and remixes it for renewed purpose. The arrival of aliens on Earth usually occurs in one of two ways. Sometimes it’s an intimate visit that affects a small group of people, as with The Blob, Invaders from Mars, or Strange Invaders. Or, it can be a worldwide invasion that threatens life as we know it, such as in War of the Worlds, Signs, or Independence Day. Attack the Block fits into the first category, which is often due to budgetary constraints with the filmmakers trying to make a smaller-scale film, rather than a blockbuster epic invasion. Presumably, the aliens all landed in South London and were attracted by the pheromones of the dead mate, as there’s no mention of further outbreaks elsewhere.

The film borrows from another London-centric alien invasion film from the 1960s called Day of the Triffids. The aliens in that film are not as scary, being carnivorous plants, but they arrive on the planet in a similar way. Brewis postulates that these aliens drift through space like spores. This is the same way the Triffids in the film version arrived, being carried to Earth via a meteor shower. A very similar premise, but then Attack the Block takes a turn. Rather than having its lead characters be scientists studying the meteorites or somehow involved in research that could stop the invasion, Cornish writes the leads as a tough group of young hoodlums. They become the anti-heroes of the piece, and characters audiences might not normally root for, but ones that have the most ability to change. It creates a more engaging story, rather than following the presumed protagonist of the film, Sam.

Societal Commentary

Attack the Block begins with the introduction of Sam, who is presumed to be the main protagonist. She is accosted by the street gang and robbed at knife point before being able to escape. That’s when the direction of the film changes, from her perspective to Moses. He is a troubled boy who gets mixed up with the local drug dealer. The assumption is that as the leader of the group, he’s older than he really is. Sam finds out later that he’s only 15 years old, which makes everything that he’s gone through seem more heartbreaking. Moses and the others are very much victims of their situation. Living in the tower blocks, around poverty, drug dens, and the assumption by the outsiders that they are automatically bad people, Moses and his mates have become pigeonholed into their roles. It’s the plight of the lower class, as the opportunities for a career or the ability to break out of their predicament is slim. Instead, they seek the comfort of what they see around them. The two young boys, Gavin and Reginald, are other examples. They want to join in with the gang so badly that they create “cool” nicknames for themselves, Probs and Mayhem, as a first step in finding something to belong to.

The film also speaks about characters finding responsibility for their actions. Moses uses the knife on Sam as a way to make the interaction end quickly. He never intended to use it, as he and the others were admittedly just as scared as she was. His bravery around the lads allows him to stand out as their leader, but only barely. They don’t necessarily see the pain they inflict on others with their petty theft and casual tossing of the contents of Sam’s wallet. She (and others) see the boys as “f***ing monsters”, terrorizing the block. It’s only when real monsters show up that a difference can be seen. Moses kills the female alien and carries its carcass around as a show of strength, not realizing that he’s creating a scent trail to his home that the other aliens will follow. For all his faults–which are really about the lack of proper role models around for him to emulate–Moses at least understands that he needs to clean up his own mess. After two of his friends are killed, he becomes a real hero to the block when he devises a plan to kill the remainder of the creatures. The chant of his name, as he’s taken into custody at the end, lets him know that he has achieved the prominence in his community that he was searching for by doing something noble and right, rather than for being a thug and a danger.

The Science in The Fiction

Leave it to the stoner character to offer the clearest explanation of what’s occurring in the film. Early on in the film, Brewis is sitting in Ron’s apartment watching a nature documentary on television discussing moths, which ends up explaining the presumed nature of the aliens. It’s not something that would necessarily be picked up by viewers in the first showing, but it allows Brewis to provide a plausible explanation to everyone later. The narrator explains that if the “territory is hospitable,” the female of the species releases a pheromone which can be detected by males “over a mile away.” When Brewis notices the odd glow of Moses’ clothes under the ultraviolet light, he makes the connection to the show he was watching earlier. This seems like the best explanation, even though from the in-universe standpoint, it’s a complete coincidence. The aliens drift through space, like seed pods on the solar winds, and when they arrive on a planet, the smaller-sized female releases a sex-related pheromone which draws the males to her for mating. Overall, it’s probably a good thing that only one female landed, and that a female even landed at all. Without that scent to draw all the other creatures into Wyndham Tower, there would have been many more deaths around the city.

The Final Frontier

Director Cornish shares his love for British science-fiction authors with a quick shot of a map of the Block the characters live in. Called the Wyndham Tower, it appears to be named after John Wyndham the author of the aforementioned story The Day of the Triffids. It is surrounded by four Courts, Clarke Court named after Arthur C. Clarke (2001: A Space Odyssey), Wells Court named after H.G. Wells (The Time Machine), Moore Court named after Alan Moore (The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen), and Huxley Court named after Aldous Huxley (Brave New World). There are also several streets listed in reference to other British authors that include Ballard Street names after J.G. Ballard (Empire of the Sun), Clayton Street potentially named after Jo Clayton, an American sci-fi author (The Diadem Saga), Adams Street named after Douglas Adams (The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Universe), and Herbert Way named after James Herbert (The Rats).

Rumors persist of a potential sequel for this film, but after 14 years the prospects seem much smaller. But fear not, because if you like the style and tone of this film, there were other films that came out around the same time that will also appeal to fans of Attack the Block. The first is an Irish film called Grabbers, a 2012 horror-comedy about aliens landing on a small Irish Isle. The film has its share of scares, and drinking, but is more in the vein of Tremors. The other recommended film is Edgar Wright’s third and final entry in his Cornetto trilogy, 2014s The World’s End. This alien invasion is a mixture of Invasion of the Body Snatchers meets The Stepford Wives (also with a lot of intoxicants), and will definitely be coming to Sci-Fi Saturdays in the coming months. Along with Attack the Block, these films showcase some of the great genre films coming from countries other than America, which is always a great place to look for new talent, new ideas, and new fun.

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