Written by Max Thornton.
Since I moved to the US, I find myself getting a little wistful every Nov. 5. It’s not that I want a Catholic monarch on the British throne, or that I’m anything other than deeply suspicious of dudebros in the mask – it’s the cultural traditions I miss. I have a lot of fond memories of attending the neighborhood bonfire (with the first mulled wine of the season flowing freely), and of sneaking through locked parks after dark to find the best place for watching the fireworks. The Fourth of July just isn’t the same, not just because it lacks the crisp crackling autumnal chill, but also because of the quintessentially British ambivalence surrounding Guy Fawkes Night. Are we celebrating the fact that a man tried to blow up Parliament, or the fact that he failed? Are we cheering on the apparent anarchism of the act, or the conservatism behind it? Or is it just that he tried to do something big and failed, which makes Guy Fawkes a very British hero?
America is not very interested in having these conversations with me. So I deal by watching Attack the Block, one my favorite movies of the past few years.
Attack the Block is a British science fiction/horror/action movie about an alien invasion of a South London council estate, and the whole film unfolds over the night of Nov. 5. A young woman named Sam is mugged by a gang of kids on her way home, but as the night progresses she finds herself forced to work with the kids to combat the aliens attacking their block.
Writer-director Joe Cornish has said that the origin of the story lies in his reflections on his own experience of getting mugged. He wanted to humanize his attackers and understand their actions without excusing their violence. This foundational compassion and empathy is evident throughout the film, even in the attitude toward the murderous aliens, who, in a nifty parallel, can only be effectively resisted once their motives are understood.
There is a split-level social consciousness to the film. If you’re on the lookout for it, there is an ongoing commentary about race and class in the UK, from the biting observation that Sam’s absent boyfriend is only interested in helping poor children in “exotic” foreign lands, not the ones struggling at home, to Moses’ theory that the aliens are the next logical step, after drugs and crime, in a government conspiracy to eliminate black boys. If you want to ignore these moments, though, you can just enjoy an engaging SF action romp whose characters are all poor and mostly people of color. Although the film begins with the sympathetically endangered, middle-class-accented white woman presented as our protagonist, it’s a clever bait-and-switch for the white middle-class viewer, because the real hero is Moses – a black, working-class-accented gang leader. (Bear in mind that accent is still the major indicator of social class in Britain, with hundreds of subtleties indistinguishable to the non-British ear.)
It is not only in his name that Moses echoes the biblical Moses. He kills the first alien, just as the biblical Moses killed the Egyptian overseer, and then has to go on the run and be a leader for his people, despite being what many would consider a less than ideal leader figure. Of course, a major difference is that Attack the Block‘s Moses is not leading his people into exodus. On the contrary, he’s helping them defend their home. The “block” plays the role of the spaceship in much of futuristic SF (and the names of the block and its street are nods to classic British SF writers: Wyndham, Ballard, and so on). It is the characters’ home, the one place in the vast void that they can call their own; they feel solidarity with the others who live there, even if they don’t know them; they want to protect it from the outside threat, but there are elements threatening it from the inside too.
Basically, the alien invasion is a way to explore the idea that poor kids in rough situations might act in ways that look like senseless yob violence to the outside observer, but internally have their own logic and sometimes even heroism. It’s a hell of a response to a mugging.
My one real complaint about the movie is its paucity of female characters. Sam winds up being a kind of Smurfette among the boys, and the brief scene with some of the kids’ sisters and female friends is sufficient to convince me that there’s an incredible parallel movie to be made about a gang of working-class girls protecting their block from alien invasion. So there certainly are named, speaking female characters, but I would want a bit more a female presence in the film for the absolute perfection I want from it.
Other than that, however, I consider Attack the Block a more or less flawless film. This Nov. 5, consider watching it, even if that means subscribing to Netflix DVD solely for this purpose. It’s worth it. Believe it.
Max Thornton blogs at Gay Christian Geek, tumbles as trans substantial, and tweets at @RainicornMax.