2. YOUTUBE
Song from the film uploaded by someone on
YouTube (here)
3. REVIEWS
Full of gory practical effects and fluent pop-cultural references, Attack the Block--an alien
invasion scenario squeezed into a single apartment building--belongs to the same species
of British genre comedy as Edgar Wright's Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz. Director Joe
Cornish takes some clever routes around the limitations of his budget, filming on location
in London's Heygate Estate (itself a once utopian science-fiction experiment) and mining
the freshness of his young cast's authentic street slang. When the aliens arrive (they
simply drop, during a frosty Bonfire Night, out of the shining pepper of the stars) they're
also smartly designed: primal and supernatural, no detail escapes their digitally-blackened
fur other than a set of menacingly glowing teeth, all of them incisors. The block's defence
is up to a group of teenage hoods, lead by the imposing Moses (John Boyega) and
reluctantly helped by middle-class neighbour Sam (Jodie Whittaker). Armed with fireworks
and mounted on muscle bikes, they launch an entertaining and Spielbergian resistance
through the block's labyrinth of corridors and walkways. As the body count racks up, Joe
Cornish's smart script highlights the block's painful social divisions: Sam, the audience
surrogate, is mugged by Moses' crew in the film's opening scene, and through Sam we're
drawn into the poignant domestic lives of kids on the brink of gangsterism. More alien to
each other than the beasts on their tail, the survival of these divided class members hangs
on the recognition that they have a stake in each other. --Leo Batchelor
Amazon.co.uk
