Attack The Block

I watched Attack the Block the other week and was pretty well impressed by it. It was good fun, with nice cheesy but imaginative low-tech effects, plenty of jumps and gore and it didn't outstay its welcome at all. Having said that, it did disappoint on quite a few levels, which was a real shame, so now I'm going to over-analyse it, because that's what I do. SPOILERS ahead.

It's an odd film, Attack the Block. In some ways not sure of itself and in other ways sort of overconfident. Overconfident in the way you could tell which of the supposedly council estate kids were actually straight outta RADA; unsure of itself in the way it handled it's biggest name stars (Look! Nick Frost! He's in a cupboard, but still. Nick Frost!). But a lot of the dialogue did ring true, and although it got a bit mawkish towards the end, when Sam wanders through Moses' flat, it handled it well and didn't linger or try to get too pop-psych about it all. I liked the cheerfulness of the men-in-suits monster design, and there were some really nice sequences, especially the various use of fireworks.

I get the impression a lot of people were put off by the opening sequence, which shows the characters who you know are going to be the heroes mugging a helpless woman. The important thing is that you aren't actually supposed to like them at this point - the set up of the shots and the way they are presented makes it very clear that they are, at this stage, monsters.

This main-cast-as-pricks (and although fleshed out and given at least some reasoning behind their actions the film is still clear that they are a bunch of pricks for mugging Sam, and Dennis especially is just a prick through and through) trope isn't that revolutionary, especially when it comes to monster/siege films (Alien 3 comes to mind most readily); not that that's a bad thing, just that we shouldn't necessarily judge them more harshly because they are the kind of pricks we might meet in our everyday life.

In fact, the fact that I could identify a lot of the characters made me like them more - so many horror movies are full of stock American teenagers or simulacrums of military and scientific personnel and so the shock of their situation is always distanced from my own life. Nice touches like the real London graffiti in an opening shot (I'm surprised, but somewhat gladdened, to see that Pest's tags are still around - made me come over all nostalgic, although I've just realised that might be something to do with the character of the same name) add to the verisimilitude. And yet, the issue of identification was one of the places that the insecurity of the film shows as well - in Brewis.

Brewis was a completely unnecessary character, except as a way in for the, I imagine, supposed audience of young, white, middle class males. He shouldn't have been in there, he shouldn't have survived; but there is this general sense that everything has to pander to that demographic, has to be for them, or else they'll throw a wobbly and won't play, and it's just depressing. The crux of the film is about the meeting of Moses' and Sam's worlds, and I feel that as a human I'm perfectly capable of empathising with either of them, even though neither of them look like I do, Brewis is an annoying irrelevance here, and getting rid of him would have provided space in the script for fleshing out Sam further, or even Ron, as the more middle class characters.

Finally of all, it was disappointing that despite a roughly equal black and white mix to the cast, at the end it was mainly black characters who were dead, (actually, only unnamed white characters died, all the named white characters survived). Seriously? Are we still doing this?