Director: Joe Cornish
Year: 2011
Stars: John Boyega, Alex Esmail, Leeon Jones, Franz Drameh, Simon Howard, Maggie McCarthy
I will admit that I was a little sceptical about watching this. It got really good reviews, and I had wanted to see it since it was released, but it's a film about kids in South London attacking aliens. How good could it really be? Surely it was just going to be, at least in some sense, another alien movie? And can you really make kids living in South London who mug people seem redeemable?
The answers are "pretty damn good actually", "not really" and "yes, as long as you make at least one of them sorry". Attack the Block is as good as the critics said it was. It probably helped that maybe I wasn't expecting something amazing, but I'm not sure even good expectations would have ruined this one. Yes, the basic premise is that some horrible kids from South London are trying to deal with an alien invasion. But every convention is subverted; everything you expect to happen either doesn't, or happens in such a way you didn't expect it in the first place.
The beauty with Attack the Block is that the whole movie is set up knowing you'll expect one thing, then deliberately doing something totally different. And if none of that gets you interested, well, it's funny too. It loses a star simply because I don't think it's the type of movie I'm likely to want to watch over and over again. But I still strongly recommend it.
Rating: 4 out of 5
No comments:
Post a Comment