In South London No One Can Hear You Scream

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Attack the Block opens with a young white woman named Sam walking to her apartment at night. She is then surrounded by a bunch of mostly black teenage boys, held at knife-point, knocked to the ground, and robbed. Two minutes later Sam's run away, and the film appears to become her muggers' film, and we're supposed to be laughing at their jokes and riding high, and I just wanted to walk out of the theater.

Sam does come back a bit later and becomes an integral part of the film. I suppose she and Moses, the 15 year old head of the gang that mugged her, could be considered co-leads of the film since it sort of becomes about their Enemy Mine-like journey to mutual understanding amid science-fictional shenanigans. But I had a fairly rough time with the first forty minutes or so of Attack the Block, trying to wrap my head around why I was supposed to want to spend a second of time with these punks. They weren't as funny as the film seemed to find them, and I spent a good amount - too long, really - wishing the aliens would gobble them up and be done with it.

Oh right, aliens. This is a movie about aliens, in case you don't know. Sort of an untethered-to-nostalgia Super 8, if you will - it's very Goonies, actually. (If The Goonies had punched Martha Plimpton in the face in the opening scene, that is.) See, Moses & Co.'s mugging of Sam is interrupted by some meteors filled with space-monsters falling out of the sky, and it becomes a question of survival on the streets of South London. Course these kids would tell you - and do - that it's always a question of survival on the streets of South London - this night it's just the they're up against a villain of extraterrestrial nature instead of other gangs or the cops.

That the film does a sideways dive into the urban blight of these kids' situation is admirable, and for the most part thankfully handled lightly (nobody goes to a movie about boys hitting monsters with baseball bats for a wordy treatise on race relations). There are more than a couple of moments where they stick the landing - when Sam admits her boyfriend is an aid worker helping out kids in Ghana, one of the kids battling aliens alongside her asks why he doesn't stay here and help the kids in London instead. But for every smart comment like that there's one that feels flat - you could see the "surprise reveal" of Moses' home-life coming from a light-year away, for one. And there were what felt like fifteen slow-motion shots of Sam seeing Moses do something noble and tough and the film poking us in the eye with "Hey, look! She's getting over the mugging thing! So should you!" that felt like trying way too hard...

But did the film really have a choice? I think they might've set themselves a somewhat insurmountable goal in that opening scene, and the only way to dig themselves out of it was to push back like gangbusters at those heavy first impressions they gave us. Imagine if The Silence of the Lambs had opened with the scene of Hannibal Lector eating that nurse's face off that we only hear about second-hand well in the film as is - after that, it would've been a slightly rougher road to anti-heroism for him in the audience's eyes, no? We want our lead characters to be flawed, of course. We want them to be complicated human beings that have to overcome inner and outer obstacles, to ride along with them for that journey, and well-made movies pretty much to a tee give that to us. I suppose the problem here is tone, especially in the wake of what we get at the start. Basically, just don't expect me to start chuckling at these kids' good-time street-thuggery five seconds after you've shown them assault a woman, dude!

But wait, aliens. This is a movie about aliens, in case you don't know. And here's the kicker that's really complicating matters for me - unlike the sub-par beastie in Super 8, these alien-monsters really kinda kick all kinds of ass. A totally unique design that's instantly memorable, very creepy, and delightfully inexplicable. Just weird, man! In a funny way that's really a joy to look at. Plus they make a shit-ton of sense thematically (talk about black versus white - they're darker than dark) and there's enough biological explanation to hang a decent plot across.

So where does this leave us? My feelings towards the film are fairly all over the place, but more than I anticipated with a movie about rubbery aliens fighting teenage gangstas and stuffed with weed jokes the movie's put my brain into overdrive. I haven't been able to stop thinking about it since last night, for better or worse, and the buttons the film pushes it pushes on purpose, even if at times it's kind of feels like watching a little kid banging on a toy piano.

Attack the Block opens in limited release on July 29th.

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