With the rash of alien-invasion films over the past few years, it’s not surprising that two such films battled it out for the top spot at the box office during the last week of July. What is rather surprising is that those two films were John Favreau’s Cowboys and Aliens – a film that marries anachronism to future fears of extraterrestrial overlords – and Sony’s The Smurfs – a film that proves contemporary screenwriting and unoriginality are synonymous. Given Favreau’s previous success with the Iron Man and its sequel, the opening for Cowboys and Aliens is not surprising. However, the power of The Smurfs to match the 32.6million dollar draw is a bit curious.
What’s a bit more interesting in this race to the top of the bottom is the exclusion of Attack the Block from virtually every box-office-gross list, only pulling in $130,000 domestically – but over 4million worldwide. Another alien film released over the same weekend, Attack the Block gives the audience visitors from outer space whose invasion of Earth takes place in a South London housing project. It doesn’t promise high-powered CGI action and adventure likeCowboys, and it doesn’t offer cute, marketable, blue-skinned beings with naughty smurfin’ mouths from another world, but Attack the Block offers mordant social commentary on race, class, and ownership. More importantly, it delivers what it offers from its genre: a film about eradicating an alien invasion. While there is certainly a race-based allegory to be gleaned from this film, it’s not so heavy that you need Bayer to get through the third act. (Say likeDistrict 9, a film that inspires a hunger for prawns more than sympathy to plight.) Instead, the human characters within the film – with the exception of Sam (Jodie Whittaker) – are ambiguously protagonists and antagonists, prohibiting us from fully sympathizing with them, but not eliding the film’s assertion that nurture has brought them to this point, not nature – at least, not a historical nature devoid of imperialism, colonialism, and racism.
As the film opens, Sam, a young white woman, walks home from work at night through a gritty neighborhood that is later revealed as the area in which she lives. Ignorant to this, five young hoodie-donned and handkerchief-masked men of the same neighborhood confront her, threaten her with a knife and mug her. At the end of the mugging, what appeared to previously be a shooting star crashes into a car on the same street as the mugging. As Sam flees for safety, the five hooligans investigate the caved-in car. The leader, Moses (John Boyega) snoops first and is scratched across the face as the mysterious flash of white leaps from the car and flees into the park, to which Moses wipes the side of his face and declares “I’m gonna fuck this thing up.”
This action introduces the presence of something foreign, and the audience is aware of its volatility — reaffirming the fear of alien invasion. At the same time, Moses’ reaction outlines a social structure that we might be unfamiliar with from other alien-invasion movies. Essentially, he has no fear; instead of wondering what plummeted from the sky, survived, and attacked, Moses and his brood react in a manner that bespeaks the colonized: a reactionary aggression that testifies to the fear of being pushed further down the social hierarchy, something that is supported by Moses’ exclamatory “Welcome to London, motherfucker!” when he impales the creature after tracking it down in the park. Here, the clan adopts ownership of their city – something that is doubly ironic because their economic standing suggests they own little more than nothing – but here, they announce their supremacy to the strange other that is the extraterrestrial. In other words, the recourse of the economic and – mostly – racial minority is to oppress and suffocate the introduction of a smaller minority to prevent their own further relegation to the bottom. And, in a way, the brood’s attack on the alien give credence to why they initially mugged Sam – the white interloper in their territory.
Attack the Block goes pretty deep on this angle and it’s often reaffirmed through variations of the assertion that “we must protect the block” or “motherfuckas think they own the block,” but the narrative isn’t oppressively redundant; rather, it balances its eighty-seven minutes between the alien / human chase as well as the various social constructs that stem from this hierarchy. Regarding the action between man and alien, it’s smoothly shot and the CG is adequate. There are a number of close ups of the alien that suggests the use of giant furry models as opposed to green-screened result of what would happen if “a monkey fucked a fish,” but this is effective because the pitch black ominousness of the creatures adds to their mystery. Likewise, the crux of the film stays away from visually masturbating the audience and focuses on the actors and the narration. In that sense, Attack the Block was more successful than Super 8 at frightening an audience with its aliens. Super 8’s alien was meticulously created to be a visual spectacle, but Block’s alien is frightening because we were only privy to a flashes, banshee-like wails, and neon teeth.
The invasion itself and the final frames of the film also establish a disconnect between the lower class and everyone else. While a handful of residents from Clayton Estates are fighting for their existence – and the possible existence of London, in general – they receive no accolades and wind up absorbing the punishment for preventing what prophecies an intergalactic Trojan War . There’s certainly some criticism of racial – and economic – stereotyping here, but more poignant to this facet of the narrative is how the block itself is disassociated from not only London proper, but all other blocks in the same geographic area, Instead of inclusion in the scope of South London, Clayton Estates is subdivided as its own territory under the jurisdiction of Hi-Hatz (Jumayn Hunter), a despotic drug dealer who lives in the symbolically hierarchical penthouse with a view over all that he reigns.
Refreshingly, the film does not absolve the gang of their crimes and does not use the climate within in London in general, or this particular evening specifically to absolve them of any prior actions. Moses does not follow up his heroic acts with martyrdom. If nothing else, he exit is epiphanic to both himself, his brethren, and Sam.
