Review of Attack the Block (2011) by Andrew D — 11 Sep 2013

The producers of Shaun of the Dead have grabbed Nick Frost to star in their own attempt at a Cornetto-ish take of the sci-fi genre, Attack the Block. The film follows a young woman who has just been mugged by a group of kids who declare that they own "the block.

" When she runs away, the kids are left to deal with an alien that attacks them. When they kill it, they go on and on about being heroes. Little do they know that there are more on the way, and they're much bigger and more aggressive.

Attack the Block was a pleasant little surprise, even though it certainly wasn't as good as any of Edgar Wright's films. This film tries to take a similar approach to what was done in Shaun of the Dead by developing the characters as a priority before they go into full swing with their sci-fi satire.

Unfortunately, it doesn't work as well because these characters are so unlikeable at the beginning that you can't help but feel sick to your stomach when you realize that these hoodlums were to be the ones that we were supposed to follow to the end.

There's about twenty minutes of this and I was having moments of wanting to turn it off because I wasn't really liking where this script was going. The only character that I could really get behind was Pest (Alex Esmail) because he seems to be the most innocent of the group and is a much more likeable lead than the people he's with.

Suddenly, things change when the aliens start to attack. There's better character development as the film goes on, making me like the characters more than I did. There were even times where I felt bad that a character died because their development was that effective.

The action in this film is truly something to behold, especially for a low budget film. It's well choreographed and will get you hyped from the moment the beasts are chasing after our heroes. What I really liked best about the film though was the final reveal at the end that made the character of Moses near perfect and had me rooting for him for the remaining runtime.

The script itself gets a slow start in the beginning with some strange writing and direction, but it immediately picks up later and the dialogue gets much smarter than it was before. Overall, Attack the Block is a fairly decent film.

I wasn't a huge fan of the first act, but everything afterwards gets a million times better than it was before and makes the film all the more enjoyable.