My review: Attack the Block

[SPOILER ALERT]

The most stunning thing about Joe Cornish's Attack the Block is the final scene, when Moses, the head hood of a gang of London youths, is packed into the back of a police paddy wagon to the sound of grateful neighbors chanting his name. You're leaning forward in your chair almost far enough for the person in front of you to hear your breathing, and you're thinking what you would say as a character witness at his trial. At the beginning of the film, Moses (John Boyega) is a 15-year-old miscreant with a deep, angry stare protecting his vulnerability. In the final scene, that stare has transformed into the hard gaze of someone willing to sacrifice himself for the people he cares about. You almost forget about the aliens.

One of these aliens falls out of the sky, interrupting Moses and his gang of wannabe hoods as they mug Sam, a young nurse living in "the block," a high rise, low-rent apartment building in London. Moses and his posse chase down the alien to an abandoned building, where they beat it to death and haul it to a local pot peddler (Nick Frost) for safekeeping. Unbeknownst to all, this little act of street cruelty brings down a hail of aliens looking for their fallen brethren, and it's up to Moses' gang and its unlikely ally Sam to save the block while evading the police and a psychopathic small-time drug lord.

Cornish's characters have a loving reality worthy of a Calvin and Hobbes strip––and in a genre known for anything but realism. Moses' reluctance to apologize for robbing Sam has the power to make us blush: Who hasn't been in the position of being too proud to say, "I'm sorry"? Sam's skepticism at the boys' claim that they've been attacked by aliens has the look and feel of an adult's practiced disbelief in tall tales, and her surprise upon learning the truth as it crashes through her front door rings sincere. 

Moses is a stand-in for the talent and resources lost to the world through poverty. A brief glimpse at the flat he shares with his absentee uncle gravely replaces the obligatory scene in which the alien is finally revealed. Filth covers every available surface, and it's clear Moses sleeps under the same sheets he did in his now-distant childhood. It's difficult to imagine a person reaching adulthood amid such squalor and neglect becoming a contributing member of society. 

It's no accident that the destruction of Moses' flat is a decisive moment––one that made the audience in my hometown theater clap.

The aliens take a back seat to the people in the film by design. Vicious, furry, and black as midnight, they're regularly referred to as wolves, and their noisy, glowing green teeth are at first mistaken for eyes. Avoiding definition at every turn, everything known about them is at best a guess or approximation. Brewis, a pothead zoologist trapped with Moses and Sam, speculates that the aliens are attracted by the smell of their own blood, on the evidence that everyone they've killed has come into contact with a dead alien; he admits, however, that he is incredibly stoned and probably incorrect.

For a movie that addresses inner city poverty, hooliganism and responsibility, Attack the Block is free from ham-handed catharses and clumsy moralizing. Taking its cues more from Goonies than Alien, it has the humor and lightheartedness to make it a family favorite without sacrificing smartness and vitality. And with a production budget of $13 million, it proves that thoughtful direction and clever dialogue are effective substitutes for bloated special effects budgets.