Attack the Block

I loved Attack the Block. I saw it on DVD a couple days ago and I've been thinking about it ever since. It hit on several of my favorite things all at once: science fiction movie tropes, class, found family, and so on.

My favorite thing right off was how realistic it was. What would a bunch of tough city kids do if an alien landed in their neighborhood and gouged three deep marks in the face of their leader? They'd go after it and beat it to death, obviously. I loved that so much. They didn't do any of the usual sci-fi things, like call the authorities, panic, run away, try to capture it, whatever.

This struck me all throughout. These kids did exactly what real kids would do, not what kids in movies would do. They protected their own, unless they couldn't. They weren't heroic. They ran away a lot. They did stupid things. They went to their own perceived authority figures instead of the official ones, in this case the local grower/dealer.

And the scientific basis of the whole thing worked perfectly, too. Of course they'd kill the thing and carry it around to show it off. Of course they'd get the scent of it all over them. Of course the rest of them would come after our kids in particular, something that is hardly ever explained in any logical way in any other movie ever. Except maybe the Alien movies.

The one woman in the bunch, Sam, plays our proxy in the sense of being afraid of the gang when they attack and rob her at the beginning, then slowly getting to trust them and getting to know them, then finally getting to understand Moses right near the end. When we find out Moses is 15 and lives with an uncle who is never there, the scary tough kid from the beginning of the movie--and he was presented as terrifying, pulling a knife on Sam and physically threatening her, scaring her half to death--turns into a scared kid who overcomes all that and saves the world. Saves the world! Go, Moses! Everyone chants his name together at the end and you want to cheer right along with them.

So there's an obvious social message wrapped up in the monster movie. It's also an interesting premise, that these tough kids are the best equipped to deal with an alien invasion. You can't imagine a bunch of suburban kids pulling off anything like what they do. Or even adults from anywhere. Sam keeps trying to get them to go to the authorities, but the kids know perfectly well they'll be arrested no matter who did what.

And in a lovely arc, Moses gets arrested for mugging Sam early on, and spends the whole movie with the broken handcuffs still on his wrists, then gets arrested again at the end for who knows what. Existing, apparently, since there's no way anyone could pin anything on him. Sam points out to the officer that these are the kids who saved her and saved everyone, but the movie ends on Moses handcuffed in a police truck, listening to everyone outside chanting his name, finally smiling. I'm sure it's the only time he smiles in the whole movie but I didn't realize it until right then.

The plot is a fairly straightforward monster movie set in and around an apartment block. We lose members of the gang along the way, mostly in gory and awful ways. But it's brilliant the way it uses only what they would really have. Fireworks, kitchen knives, backpacks, scooters, bikes, super-soakers full of gasoline. The stairs and elevators play huge roles, and the grow room is the calm center of it all, where the UV light shows the marks on them that the aliens have been following.

You could look at more of the sharp and funny tricks of the movie. There's one apparently female alien, the white one that they attack at the beginning. There's one white woman they also attack at the beginning, Sam. The gang is mostly black, though there was the one white kid, but they're all from the same social stratum and speak the same language. The rest of the aliens are big and scary and black. One of the boys even makes that connection for us, in case we're too dense to pick up on it, saying that the alien is blacker than his cousin.

I would have wished that Sam was more instrumental in her role as representative from a different world. She did go turn on all the gas in the apartment where the aliens were congregating, but other than that, her role was sort of dead end and wasted. I could see not wanting her to save the day, but if you wanted to make the point that everyone has to work together instead of running around alienated (ha) and scared of each other across class lines, then she and the scared stoner boy should have had more of a contribution. Actually she and the scared stoner boy should have been conflated entirely. Sam was a nurse and should have been the one to contribute the scientific knowledge about the moths and pheromones and all that. Honestly, the stoner boy was funny but otherwise wasted. Double ha.

So it didn't quite follow through all the way but it was an excellent movie. I should have had subtitles on and translation into something I could follow, though, because as an American, I missed probably 60% of what those boys said. Maybe more. You don't need to understand every word, thank goodness, but I wish I'd understood more.

Isn't there a section of Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels where seriously dialectical English is subtitled and translated into English? That. I needed that.

Other favorite moments: when the boys all ran home to get weapons and their parents and whoever else all yelled things at them. It really brought home how young they were, lying to parents that they were out playing football and being forced to take the dog out for a walk when they were on a hunt for aliens.

And: the boys telling Sam she had a potty mouth and swore too much. Yay! And telling her they wouldn't have robbed her if they'd known she lived in the block. But she didn't look like them so how would they know? Exactly.

Excellent movie, enjoyed it very much.