An awful low-budget alien invasion flick

Feb 23, 2012

There are times when being a movie reviewer has to be one of the better things in life to do, and then there are times when you must watch a movie like Attack the Block.

Attack the Block is marketed as “brought to you by the same producer of Shaun of the Dead”. If the name Nira Park is really the reason for you to see this movie, you might as well stop reading now, as this review is for those who don’t spend hours on end finding and cataloguing errors on imdb.com.

Attack the Block is a story of five hoodlums who go from mugging a young nurse at knifepoint to skewering aliens with a samurai sword, all the while trying to say something poignant about race and the class system. Mind you if the movie would have been more entertaining, perhaps I would have paid more attention to these apparently genius social satire script turns.

I thought that the idea of an alien invasion film was that we as the audience are supposed to root for the humans – so why then were we constantly cheering for the fluorescent-toothed aliens? While the story is intriguing, with a new play on the whole alien invasion theme, the characterisations are thinly developed, leaving it up to the actors themselves to fill in the gaps.

Unfortunately for Attack the Block, the faceless, hairy, and black as night aliens often have more personality than the human actors. Not even Nick Frost (Hot Fuzz, Paul) can fix the damage. The one notable exception would be John Boyega as the leader Moses (how prophetic), who manages to show that perhaps he’s doing the best he can under the circumstances and just needs a chance/reason to change his ways.

There is talk of Hollywood doing its own version and perhaps even writer/director Joe Cornish (one half of The Adam and Joe Show) doing his own sequel so it is possible that I’m completely missing the spaceship here. This certainly ain’t my block but maybe it could be yours.