1 Time Film Excess Nominee:
Best Practical Effects (lost to Haywire)
+ Best Monster Movie of the Year
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| A poster for Joe Cornish's sci-fi actioner Attack the Block |
Attack the Block is a youth-oriented science-fiction action movie with high entertainment value and cool monsters.
A nurse gets mugged in her South London neighborhood by a bunch of no-good local kids. We follow the kids, as they subsequently kill an alien that falls out of the sky and bring it with them, and the woman, whose confidence in her home situation is shaking. Then, a more elaborate alien attack befalls the block, and the juvenile delinquents battle the beasts and find themselves attacked time and again, while being confronted with their victim from earlier in the evening.
In the end, of course, SPOILER the kids join forces with the nurse and regret their mugging.
It was a hurdle for me to get into a film that takes young mugging, knife-carrying, drug-pushing teens as its (anti-)heroes, and all the way through, it is best for the film not to think too much about its message; something optimistic about young thugs not being entirely useless, if, for instance, aliens attack. (Which doesn't really happen that often in real life, so in consequence, these characters would be useless in the real world.) I can only conclude thus, because the only thing that redeems them in the film is the fact that they have survival skills when facing the alien attack.
- As I said, the film doesn't win from too much thinking about it.
Attack lives anyhow, due to a string of finely cast local amateur boys and girls, who have charm and great likability, despite their rough attitudes. Singling out any of them is hard, because they all were very good, but John Boyega (Junkhearts (2011)) as Moses, the group's leader, and Alex Esmail (Strippers vs. Werewolves (2012)) as his right-hand-man Pest were especially good.
Nick Frost (Cuban Fury (2014)) plays an unheroic weed lab 'technician' and takes a few laughs.
What also draws is Attack's fine editing and high but suitable pace. It's action scenes and creatures are well-made. The aliens (except the first one, which seems to be the female) are pitch black, eye-less and have luminescent teeth.
It's a film that only takes place in the dark and which includes kids and drugs, weapons, violence and multiple bloody deaths. It won't be deemed wholesome or edifying by many, but it makes for excellent entertainment for ages 12 years and up, who are excited by such genre-fun. - I certainly enjoyed it.
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| John Boyega as Moses, the group's leader, runs for his life in the finale of Joe Cornish's Attack the Block |
The original, urban music in the film is composed by Simon Ratcliffe and Felix Buxton of Basement Jaxx and Steven Price.
Boyega seems to be the break-out star of Attack, this year both heading the American Imperial Dreams and also set to star in Caesar.
Writer-director Joe Cornish is set to direct Section 6, a period thriller set in 1919, and has also been busy since Attack with writing the scripts for The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn (2011) and the coming Ant-Man (2015).
Adding credit to Attack is the monster work in it: Rather than doing green-screen and CGI for almost all the creature shots, the film employed people in puppet costumes with added animatronics, and then later enhanced the effects with CGI. Apparently the young actors were genuinely scared of the 'creatures' on set and were easily able to get into states of terror, as they were attacked and ran from them before the cameras. This translates greatly into the finished product and is definitely the way to go.
Unfortunately, though critics and audiences liked the film, it flopped. For its relatively low cost, this is a shame and probably can be attributed to illegal downloading from the film's peer (young) demographic and from fierce competition from American block-busters (ha-ha) Thor and Fast and Furious 5 that both beat Attack at its pivotal UK box office. The film had a limited run in the US.
The flop is also a shame because inventive, non-Hollywood, wild and good movies for youngsters are few and far between.
Related posts:
2011 in films and TV-series - according to Film Excess [UPDATED III]
2011 in films and TV-series - according to Film Excess [UPDATED II]
2011 in films - according to Film Excess
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| A cool, graphic poster for Joe Cornish's Attack the Block |
Watch the film's trailer here and especially watch for Frost's last line, which is a real crack-up
Budget: 8 mil. £
Box office: 3.8 mil. £
= Big flop
What do you think of Attack the Block?
Don't you think it sucks that a film like this can't make its budget back at least?
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