W O R D S
B Y
m at t
irst came the ad men – Parker, Scott, Lyne – with their shimmering reflection of the 1980s: dazzling, opulent, American movies that put Britain on the map in Hollywood. Then came the television directors – Winterbottom, Greengrass, Yates – the mainstream mavericks reshaping the new century with subversive and paranoid blockbusters. Now it’s the turn of a new generation – the pop-culture kids raised on videogames and Star Wars, the arrested developers who lost their shit to George Lucas and never got it back. They grew up with ET and The Goonies, Marty McFly and Ghostbusters. Hollywood may have been a galaxy far, far away, but they absorbed the impact and imagery of American filmmaking and assimilated it into a new kind of international British cinema. The likes of Matthew Vaughn and Edgar Wright have taken
b o c h e n s k i
genres that weren’t considered part of our filmmaking identity and refashioned them into something quintessentially British. Now Joe Cornish has joined the gang – and in style. It’s not as bold as Scott Pilgrim, nor as brazen as Kick-Ass, but Attack the Block is a triumphant fusion of British values and Hollywood magic. Ever since War of the Worlds was relocated from Croydon to California for Byron Haskin’s 1953 adaptation, Britain has sacrificed sciencefiction spectacle to concentrate on the genre’s existential outer limits. Aliens invaded more meaningful places while Blighty sat back and watched. But not any more. From the moment Attack the Block announces itself with a crane shot of Oval tube station it is anchored by an unmistakably British milieu. From here we follow trainee nurse, Sam (Jodie Whittaker), as she makes her way home through the kind of unlit streets that will be instantly familiar to any south Londoner. On one of these streets, close to the estate where she lives, Sam is stopped by a gang of hoodies and, in another scene that will be familiar to many, is ‘merked’ for her wallet and ring. Just as your heart sinks at the tone of gritty urban realism, a fireball explodes, an alien appears, a beat-down follows and a full on invasion kicks off. As nightmare visions of iridescent teeth and gut-knotting growls come looking for blood, the hoodies – Pest (Alex Esmail), Dennis (Franz Drameh), Jerome (Leeon Jones), Biggz (Simon Howard) and ringleader Moses (John Boyega) – retreat to the block and prepare to fight for their lives. It’s inner city versus outer space, but it’s more than that, too. It’s idealism, ambition and audacity versus the can’t-do parochialism of British-funded film. It’s Cornish versus the cynics. The result? Bare slewage.
007