If you follow us on Twitter, you will be aware that I get very excited at around 9.55 am on Saturday mornings, exuding the giddy evangelism characteristic of the relatively small, but fiercely loyal band of fans of The Adam & Joe Show. (Saturdays at 10am on BBC 6 Music.) It was 15 years ago now that their lo-fi sketch comedy first aired on Channel 4. Broadcast from a bedroom above the Body Shop in Brixton, where Cornish’s Attack The Block is set, it consisted of a mix of satirical songs, Adam’s reluctant Dad’s video dairies, most memorably, their stuffed-toy recreations of 90’s feature films and television shows. For Adam and Joe fans, it seems a bit belated, but now, in 2011, 50% of the duo, Joe Cornish, has ditched the toy collection for a group of South London teenagers in his debut feature film, Attack The Block.
The film takes place, as the a huge Spielbergian opening shot over Oval station confirms, in Cornish’s native South London, and centres around a gang of “youths”, led by anti-hero, Moses (John Boyega), battling to protect their tower block from an alien invasion. An ambivalent love letter to South London, the inspiration for the film came when Cornish was mugged near his home by some young teens, a scene recreated in the film’s opening scene. Cornish’s excellent script then introduces us to life on the estate, exploring the large cross-section of people in day-to-day tower block life and the relationships therein. Allegorically, the political and sociological subtext is considerably richer than you would find in your average Horror/Comedy, but that is not to say that the film is without humor. The slick screenplay has a highly successful joke rate, most of which coming from scene-stealer Luke Treadaway, as Brewis, the (perhaps a tad self referential) wannabe streetwise posho, constantly pining for credibility and validation as one of the “fam”. The use of the local vernacular is heavy and always feels authentic; perhaps this will create a few problems across the pond but should be comprehensible to anyone in the UK under the age of 60.
The decision to use street casting for the majority of the roles is one that pays off, and the young cast is reinforced by solid supporting roles from Nick Frost and Jodie Whittaker. Boyega’s Moses leads the cast with confidence and bravado, winning over the audience with ease in true, Eastwoodesque, anti-hero style. The young cast is uniformly great, thanks mainly to Cornish’s accomplished directing, but the real stars of the show are our alien invaders. Scaled back to their bare essentials, these monsters consist of little more than a ball of muscular black fur and huge florescent blue teeth, a production decision perhaps, due to the film’s £8,000,000 budget, but the result is all the better for it, their spiky manes looking fantastic while creeping round a high rise corridor corner in silhouette. Visually, the film is stunning, most notably in a gorgeous slow-mo scene that takes place in the final battle, and the echoes of Spielberg and Carpenter are broad as day.
Joe Cornish has always been a preternaturally informed connoisseur of popular culture, and Attack The Block, being a genre piece, will inevitably, and perhaps unfairly, be compared to the work of Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright, but Cornish’s film is a slightly different animal, (or alien); any references to existing material are alluded to with a discreet nod as opposed to a finger point, (or a shout from the rooftops in the case of Pegg and Frost’s Paul) and the main influences are aesthetic. The stylistic references are clear (predator, gremlins, close encounters), but the film doesn’t rely on this to support itself, never descending into parody or overly referential fan boy smugness. If there is any criticism, it is that Attack The Block is just not scary enough, the screenplay’s high gag rate and near perfect pacing cover the comedy element, but as a Horror/Comedy, it is unfortunately a little lopsided.
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Attack The Block is released in the UK on May 11th.
