Throwback Thursday: Attack the Block

Every Throwback Thursday, I randomly pull out from my desk cabinet--with my eyes closed--a movie ticket I saved. Then I discuss the movie on the ticket and maybe a little bit of its score, which might be now streaming on AFOS.

"Folks who exasperatedly dismiss discussion of color with 'Not everything is about race,' are usually people who (unknowingly) have the privilege of being viewed as race-less (white). The race-less of course have the freedom to decide what is and isn't about race. Those that are not seen as race-less (people of color) don't. [Joe] Cornish seems to understand what many people don't want to admit, that a person's race shapes their experience in the world. Whether it should or shouldn't, it very much does. Ignoring this fact, even if well intentioned, perpetuates inequality. The boys in Block, as young men of color, are always aware of racial dynamics. So constant is this awareness, neither positive nor negative, that it becomes unconscious, like breathing. It's always there. The film takes place completely within this understanding."--Kartina Richardson (2011)

If it weren't for its teen characters' awareness of the elephant in the room called race, as well as the equally intriguing way Joe Cornish avoids being heavy-handed about it, Attack the Block--the British comedian's 2011 feature-length directorial debut--would just be an ordinary low-budget monster movie with a diverse cast instead of the above-average low-budget monster movie with a diverse cast it wound up becoming. Sure, it's always nice to see a black teen or an Asian American as the main protagonist in a sci-fi story, but what really matters in the end is how that story makes that protagonist of color come alive as a credible human being, and Attack the Block succeeds in that department.

Cornish is white, but one thing that makes him bolder than other white creators who have placed characters of color at the center of the sci-fi action is his decision to make Moses (John Boyega) a regular street kid instead of the saintly (and more palatable to older and more affluent white folks) cop or soldier of color who's usually pitted against unfriendly creatures in sci-fi. At one point, Sam (Jodie Whittaker), a 20-something white nurse who's mugged by Moses and his mostly black friends at the start of the film and evolves from despising them to relying on them for her survival, is seen suggesting to them that they turn to the police for help in protecting their South London neighborhood from bloodthirsty alien beasts that have suddenly landed in South London for mysterious reasons.

Moses and his male and female friends want nothing to do with the Five-0--"You think the police is gonna help them? They might not arrest you, but they'll arrest them," says Tia (Danielle Vitalis), a neighborhood girl with a crush on Moses, to Sam--and Moses believes the aliens were sent to South London by the same government that sics the police on black kids and is responsible for various other things in what the British call the block and what we Americans call the projects. "Government probably bred those creatures to kill black boys. First they sent drugs to the ends. Then they sent guns. Now they sent monsters to get us. They don't care, man. We ain't killing each other fast enough, so they decided to speed up the process," says Moses. Right when Tia points out to Sam the privilege she has as a white person and Moses spouts his theory about the aliens being government-made, an acknowledgement of the racism that permeates the world outside the theater or TV screen finally emerges in the dialogue of this escapist movie--rather than the movie acknowledging it through coded dialogue from white characters like one lady's earlier view of Moses and the hoodies as "fucking monsters"--and Attack the Block, which was co-executive-produced by Edgar Wright, becomes something truly special and alive as escapist entertainment.

At that moment, this sci-fi story that takes place in the projects declares that, for once, it's not going to shy away from race and hide behind silly sci-fi metaphors to address race or naively attempt to put a Band-Aid on racism (the teens' frankness about the ignorant attitudes of the police in blocks like Moses and Sam's makes this film continue to resonate, especially during the rise of #BlackLivesMatter and the stupidity of #AllLivesMatter, a hashtag that could only come from the minds of privileged dolts). Also at around that point in the story, Attack the Block makes it clear that a cop won't be the hero of the narrative like he or she often is. Instead, the misunderstood kid who frequently gets harassed or cuffed (or killed) by such cops becomes the hero here, and though he's tougher than the other hoodies and will outlive some of them, he's extremely human, thanks to Cornish's writing for Moses and Boyega's ability to balance toughness with vulnerability. It's no wonder Boyega was cast in the J.J. Abrams-directed Star Wars: The Force Awakens: he's great at reacting to the mayhem surrounding him, just like how his Force Awakens co-star Harrison Ford was terrific at reacting to mayhem in action classics like Raiders of the Lost Ark and The Fugitive.



While being interviewed by Esquire about the upcoming 007 movie Spectre, Daniel Craig said he admires Ford's performance in Raiders because "he's so fallible, to the point of comedy. You know at any time he might fuck up, and that adds to the danger and the excitement and the joy of it." That's also the key to why Boyega's performance in Attack the Block is equally enjoyable. There's a scene where you expect Moses to have a grand action hero moment and save Tia and her best friends from aliens who have invaded Tia's flat, but his katana gets stuck in a wall behind him, and Sam ends up having to save him. Meanwhile, Tia and Dimples (Paige Meade) don't really need Moses' help and are doing quite okay on their own, thanks to their fighting skills with whatever item they can get their hands on. Fuck Matt Damon. These ice skate-wielding South London girls should be the stars of Damon's next Bourne movie. Later on, when Moses gets his opportunity to finally blow each and every alien to smithereens with his lighter, his hands start to shake out of nervousness.

A lesser filmmaker would write Moses as being badass and flawless all the time, but Cornish prefers to make his protagonist a bit more complicated. He's as flawed as the Park siblings from the Bong Joon-ho masterpiece The Host (a double feature of Attack the Block and The Host, by the way, would be like the illest double feature ever) and is perhaps even more thoughtless than either of the Parks because in addition to mugging Sam, he's made the mistake of getting into business with an impulsive, murks-anybody-who-looks-at-him-wrong neighborhood drug lord named Hi-Hatz (Jumayn Hunter) and has made the additional mistake of murking the female alien whose pheromone summons all the male "gorilla wolf motherfuckers" to South London. In Predator, Arnold Schwarzenegger wasn't responsible for bringing to the jungle the titular hunter from outer space, whereas in Attack the Block, our hero is the cause of all the bloodshed and the losses of some of his friends. So when it's up to Moses to fix what he started and decide what kind of adult he wants the block to remember him as, the climax of Attack the Block takes on an unexpected power, aided by both slow motion that doesn't look clichéd and silly for once and "Moses vs. the Monsters," a pulsating score cue by composer Steven Price and Basement Jaxx partners Felix Buxton and Simon Ratcliffe ("Moses vs. the Monsters" is in rotation during the AFOS blocks "Beat Box," "Hall H" and "AFOS Prime").

One other thing makes Cornish bolder than other white writers who are outsiders looking in on ethnic settings they've chosen to write about: the wide range of black teen characters Sam encounters as the alien invasion forces her out of her comfort zone. (Had Attack the Block been a mainstream hit in America, it would have caused that racist old moron Lou Dobbs to get his panties in a bunch over the kinds of characters it chooses to sympathize with.) A lesser white writer would probably make every black teen character interchangeable and as sullen and parentless as Moses or as hotheaded as Dennis (Franz Drameh), whereas each of Moses' friends is distinctive in background (Moses is the only one who comes from a broken home, and the closest thing he has to a parent is an uncle who's never there) and temperament. For instance, Biggz (Simon Howard) has a white mom and is less willing than the others to get himself into dangerous situations; Tia and Dimples are similarly disdainful about Moses' flirtation with a criminal lifestyle. This also ties into how Attack the Block doubles as a thankfully non-preachy critique of the demonization of the working class in England.

Cornish was a one-time mugging victim who wanted to better understand his muggers and their everyday lives instead of being resentful of them (the mugging of Sam, who's clearly a stand-in for Cornish, was based on the incident Cornish experienced), so he takes working-class kids like the kindly and dorky Jerome (Leeon Jones) and the dorkier Biggz, who spends most of the film hiding in a trash bin, and he fleshes out those characters to prove the irrationality of demonizing and simplifying the underclass. One minute, they're mugging somebody and not enjoying it at all (they later admit to being scared while doing the mugging), and the next, they're chatting with Mum or Grandmum on their phones like typical 13-to-15-year-olds trying to make it home in time for dinner.

What also makes Attack the Block stand out is the much-welcome absence of CGI ("We used CGI a little to enhance, but mainly to remove details," said Cornish to GQ in 2011). The creature FX work in Cornish's film is largely practical. The alien attacks are fast and brutal, and this is a rare case where the fast-cutting that so many film critics complain about when they critique contemporary action movies is absolutely necessary. The fast-cutting prevents us from noticing how low-budget the monsters are: they're essentially just stuntmen--led by the great Terry Notary, one of the motion-capture performers who starred as the apes in the last two Planet of the Apes movies and a movement coach for those movies, by the way--inside eyeless gorilla suits outfitted with neon green teeth. But because the Attack the Block aliens aren't CG, there's a formidability and weighty presence to them that's missing from most CG creatures.

On one of Attack the Block's Blu-ray audio commentaries, Cornish says the inability to afford extensive CG FX allowed him to get authentic reactions from his child actors since the monsters were physically there on the set. The performances of the kids--who hadn't been in the acting game long enough to receive training on how to look like you're not pretending during a job that requires you to pretend things that aren't there are actually there--wouldn't have been the same if they had to react to a tennis ball on a stick. Attack the Block is more of a sci-fi actioner than a genuinely scary horror flick--The Walking Dead contains 10 times more gore each week--but the film contains one horrific moment: the child actors may have been way more terrified of the aliens than us adult viewers are, but the split-second shot of a mutilated Hi-Hatz looking like a black Voldemort makes you finally understand the kids' genuine fear.

The year 2011 saw four different Steven Spielberg-produced projects about alien invasions emerge in the same summer: the Abrams-directed Super 8, Transformers: Dark of the Moon, Cowboys & Aliens and the TNT original drama Falling Skies, which just recently ended its run. I barely remember any of them, aside from Elle Fanning's amusing transformation into a zombie for Super 8's movie-within-a-movie and the troublemaking antics of Colin Cunningham's biker character Pope during Falling Skies' first season, whereas Attack the Block, which was made for much less and details an invasion that's on a much smaller scale, is a film that's still on my mind. Its potent mix of monster movie thrills and nuanced, non-preachy social commentary about both racial inequality and white privilege makes it a film I keep revisiting. Attack the Block murks them all.

Steven Price and Basement Jaxx's outstanding score cues from Attack the Block can currently be heard during the AFOS blocks "Beat Box," "Hall H" and "AFOS Prime." The 1993 KRS-One classic "Sound of da Police" and Richie Spice's "Youth Dem Cold," the two most memorable existing songs during Attack the Block, cannot be heard on AFOS, but they would have been part of the now-defunct AFOS block "Rock Box," which was discontinued in 2012 due to limited station hard drive space and the elimination from rotation of anything that wasn't original score material.

Throwback Thursday: Hanna

Every Throwback Thursday, I randomly pull out from my desk cabinet--with my eyes closed--a movie ticket I saved. Then I discuss the movie on the ticket and maybe a little bit of its score, which might be now streaming on AFOS.

Cate Blanchett is a terrific actress--I've enjoyed much of the Australian star's screen work ever since Elizabeth, the story of Fred Sanford's dead wife--but her attempt at a Southern accent in the 2011 teen assassin thriller Hanna is horrendous. British or Australian actors who mangle American accents have been a pet peeve of mine for a long time. The onslaught of these actors starring as American icons (Martin Luther King) or superheroes (the current Superman is a Brit, and so were the last cinematic Batman and the last pre-Marvel Cinematic Universe-era Spider-Man) is kind of worrisome because most of them really cannot do an American accent. The sight of many American roles in film and TV getting outsourced to white actors from other countries particularly bugs me because there are tons of Asian American or African American actors who are far better qualified at sounding American than those British or Aussie performers, and they're not getting those parts.

There's always one single word during a British or Aussie actor's performance as an American character that trips them up or brings their whole façade crashing down. Most often, that word is "anything." They tend to pronounce it as "en-nuh-thin"--Scottish star Karen Gillan's otherwise flawless American accent would slip during Selfie whenever she said "ennathin'"--instead of the American way: "en-nee-thing." During John Boyega's performance as a falsely accused American drone pilot on last summer's 24: Live Another Day, that word was "missile." Boyega pronounced it the U.K. way: "mis-eyel," as in making it rhyme with "aisle." The believability of Aussie actor Guy Pearce's performance as an ambitious '50s LAPD detective in L.A. Confidential was ruined at the very end of the film by Pearce's pronunciation of "Angeles" as "an-juh-lees"--a non-American way of saying it--instead of "an-juh-lehs." In Hanna, the word that trips up Blanchett is the movie's goddamn title! Her evil, 1998 Gillian Anderson-haired CIA agent character refers to the titular heroine she's chasing as "Hahn-uh." Yeah, that's not exactly the Southern way to pronounce it.

It's not like Blanchett can't do a Southern accent at all. She actually mastered it once before as a Georgia fortune teller with genuine psychic powers in the 2000 Sam Raimi thriller The Gift (dig the musicality Blanchett brings to the line where her psychic character, who's being threatened by a customer's scummy redneck husband, explains to her son why she's grabbed a baseball bat: "Don't worry, honey, I'm just working on my swing"). Blanchett shouldn't really be blamed for an accent that's so all over the map Google Maps would throw up its hands in frustration and mutter, "I fucking give up. You're on your own." The blame should fall on the dialect coach Hanna director Joe Wright hired for Blanchett. It's clearly not the same dialect coach who helped Blanchett speak during the filming of The Gift. The Hanna dialect coach should be kidnapped, locked in that punishment cabin from the summer camp in Addams Family Values and forced to watch Hillbilly Handfishin' on a loop. (And then the casting director who told Wright that it would be a good idea to hire the whitest actress to star as Tiger Lily in this summer's Pan should be dropped off in an Indian reservation and forced to live there without money and a smartphone for a month.)

Did they really need to make Agent Marissa Wiegler an American, along with all the other CIA agents in Hanna who are unconvincingly portrayed by British actors? It's not like everyone in that agency's personnel is American. There are foreigners who work there. Take, for example, the funniest CIA agent of them all: Avery Bullock, the deranged agency boss Patrick Stewart voices on American Dad. He's a Brit. I would have rather had seen Wright and screenwriters Seth Lochhead and David Farr shoehorn into Hanna some little backstory that Wiegler isn't American--like how Schwarzenegger flicks used to always squeeze in some dialogue about the hero's Austrian roots to explain what an American supercop is doing walking around with a thick Austrian accent--instead of the unintentionally funny attempt to pass Wiegler off as a Southerner. And that's not the only over-the-top and theatrical-sounding accent in Hanna. In fact, everyone in the film--who's not a member of the family of ordinary British tourists Hanna befriends while she's on the lam, that is--has a bizarre accent. There's the campy fake German accent Tom Hollander uses while he steals parts of the film as Wiegler's sadistic German associate Isaacs. But that accent somehow works. Meanwhile, Blanchett's campy fake Southern accent does not.

Her lousy accent fails to bring down a solid first action movie from a director who was previously known for period costume dramas like Atonement and Anna Karenina, just like how Wiegler fails to bring down this tough little German girl she wants to eliminate. Hanna is Saoirse Ronan's movie all the way, a remarkable coming-out party for the Atonement star's action side. Since Hanna, Ronan's starred in another art-house teen assassin flick, Violet & Daisy, and the Stephenie Meyer YA sci-fi adaptation The Host. Like in The Host, Ronan did all her own stunts as Hanna. She received martial arts training from legendary Bruce Lee protégé Dan Inosanto, and her verisimilitude as an action heroine--not once can you detect shitty CGI that pastes Ronan's eyebrowless face over some 42-year-old double's body--lends the film a certain edge and raggedy energy, whether she's leaping over shipping containers in an epic chase scene or simply snapping the pretty neck of Downton Abbey star Michelle Dockery, who briefly appears as one of Hanna's first human kills.

It's not just a strong physical performance. It's a really good dramatic one too. Ronan skillfully balances Hanna's fierce killing machine side with her vulnerable, innocent and curious child side. Wright frequently said he envisioned Hanna as a modern-day Grimm fairy tale--this one has an espionage backdrop and a dental hygiene-obsessed CIA scumbag as the evil witch--but I always interpreted Hanna as less of a fairy tale and more like an alien-on-Earth story a la The Iron Giant. Just replace the sentient robot soldier who discovers the wonders of Earth and decides that he doesn't want to be a gun with a home-schooled, feral and genetically engineered German teen who gets a taste of the world outside her wilderness classroom and realizes she wants no part of the kind of life her ex-CIA associate dad (Eric Bana, also working with a campy German accent) trained her for.

And how about that futuristic original score by the Chemical Brothers? It's like a fifth character in the movie, but it's definitely my favorite character, even more so than Hanna herself. The Hanna score, which can be heard during both "AFOS Prime" and the new AFOS espionage score music block "AFOS Incognito," is a remarkable aural achievement from a duo that never scored a film before. The tongue-in-cheek and creepy melody they wrote for Isaacs to whistle repeatedly--it's known on the score album as "The Devil Is in the Details"--is an all-time great villain theme.

Part of why the Chemical Brothers' propulsive score will stand the test of time is because the Chemical Brothers were simply allowed to be the Chemical Brothers, and they didn't acquiesce to the ubiquitous Inception foghorn from old Love Boat episodes--which was popular then and is still all over action film score music--or any other Hans Zimmer-esque flourish like the ones that are evidence of John Powell's roots as a member of Zimmer's Media Ventures collective during Powell's scores for the Bourne movies. Sure, the equally beloved Daft Punk/Joseph Trapanese score from 2010's Tron: Legacy contains some "BRAHM!," but it works for that video game-inspired gladiator movie. It wouldn't have worked for either Hanna or what the Chemical Brothers were aiming for, and that was to sound as alien as Hanna herself. "BRAHM!" would have stuck out like a really bad Southern accent.

Star Wars: The Force Awakens teaser trailer breakdown

The green screen FX for this scene are extraordinary. Andy Serkis put on an unusual-looking motion-capture suit to do this, and he's really convincing in the role of The Following Preview Has Been Approved To Accompany This Feature By The Motion Picture Association Of America, Inc.

Here we see John Boyega on the toilet after a very bad order of fish and chips.

This is what came out of John Boyega's ass while he took that painful shit.

Whoa, SWAT team, aren't you a little overdressed for the peaceful protest of the Ferguson verdict?

Daisy Ridley rides off on what every teenage Star Wars fangirl will want for Christmas in 2015: a big-ass USB drive.

Oscar Isaac took the part of a cat-loving folk singer in Inside Llewyn Davis even though he dislikes cats. He also took the part of a helmeted Rebel Alliance fighter pilot even though he dislikes helmets because they give him Albert Einstein hair.

Adam Driver presents the latest technology in cutting down trees.

The puke-stained T-shirt of the cameraman who ralphed while filming this battle scene up in the sky is now going for $1,200 on eBay.

From a six-year nightmare of shitty dialogue, wooden acting, racial stereotypes and turgid storytelling.

The casting of John Boyega and Oscar Isaac boosts Star Wars: Episode VII from "Why is this being made?" to "Shit done got interesting"

(Photo source: Tor)

"I'm not going to play Luke again. He's over. He had a beginning, a middle and an end," said Mark Hamill to me in a phone interview we recorded on a late Sunday night in 1998 for a Batman: The Animated Series-related episode of the terrestrial radio incarnation of A Fistful of Soundtracks.

Flash forward to 2014. Disney has finally confirmed--after about a year of "Lucasfilm's been talking to us"-type comments to the press from the original Star Wars trilogy stars--that Hamill will reunite with Harrison Ford, Carrie Fisher, Peter Mayhew (Chewbacca), Anthony Daniels (C3P0) and Kenny Baker (R2D2) for J.J. Abrams' tentatively titled Star Wars: Episode VII.

So much for "I'm not going to play Luke again."

A Star Wars: Episode VII cast read-through at Pinewood Studios

I'm what you call a lapsed Star Wars fan. I love the first two Star Wars films. That's about it. I don't care for the rest of the franchise, although Genndy Tartakovsky's cel-animated Clone Wars shorts from the early 2000s were pretty solid and way more satisfying than George Lucas' dreadful and woodenly executed prequel trilogy (as is Matthew Haley and David Walker's fake Blackstar Warrior trailer, which I still wish would be made into an actual movie). So when Hamill, Ford and Fisher started giving hints to the press about reprising their roles in Episode VII, I was both glad for their return and skeptical about it because the last time Ford reunited with a former co-star for a Lucasfilm project, it resulted in another post-1989 Lucasfilm sequel I'd like to have Lacuna'd from my memory: Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.

One of the reasons why Crystal Pepsi was underwhelming was because Crystal Gravy was badly in need of a rewrite from Lawrence Kasdan, who co-wrote Raiders of the Lost Ark, The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi (Kasdan, who, along with Ford, wanted Han Solo to be killed off in that threequel but were both overruled, isn't to blame for the problems of that film). Abrams' recruitment of Kasdan for the Episode VII screenplay was the first good sign about Episode VII. (However, I'm still concerned about Abrams as a director: are we getting the Abrams who directed both the still-excellent Lost pilot and the first and best Chris Pine Star Trek film--and also got a great villainous performance out of the late Philip Seymour Hoffman in Mission: Impossible III--or the Abrams who directed the mediocre, Khan-whitewashing Star Trek Into Darkness?)

An equally promising sign of things to come is this week's confirmed casting of John Boyega, the British star of one of my favorite sci-fi flicks of the last 10 years, Attack the Block, and Oscar Isaac, who was terrific as a dickish '60s folk singer in the Coen Brothers' Inside Llewyn Davis, as two of the new Star Wars leads. (With Isaac's Llewyn co-star Adam Driver on board in a villain role, it'll be especially fun to see Isaac go from crashing on Driver's couch to firing ion cannons at him. And with Max von Sydow playing what I assume to be Driver's Sith master too? Sweet.)

I've noticed that Boyega, who received accolades at Sundance this year for his performance as a South Central L.A. ex-con in Imperial Dreams (a film that, by the way, was scored by the talented Flying Lotus, who ought to be scoring more films), is first billed in the non-alphabetical cast list in Disney's Episode VII casting announcement. Is this a hint that this trilogy under Abrams' direction will be the first Star Wars trilogy with a person of color as the lead? As someone who wants to see more diversity in, well, everything, I sincerely hope so. As early as Attack the Block, Boyega proved that he's capable of the gravitas that's required to spearhead a sci-fi/fantasy franchise like Star Wars.

John Boyega in Attack the Block

"Moses' trajectory from irresponsible thug to adult who decides to own up to his mistakes... is believable and compelling, thanks to Boyega," I wrote back in 2011, when I first saw Attack the Block. "He has a couple of intriguing little moments where the badass and authoritative gang leader façade disappears, and with some great acting by Boyega with just his eyes, we see a scared kid who's in over his head and whom the film later reveals--in one of its best scenes--to be much younger than he appears to be."

Now envision Boyega bringing all those moments of believability and vulnerability to a Jedi who's learning the ways of the Force, under the direction of a filmmaker who didn't take a 22-year break from directing that resulted in his storytelling skills becoming as rusty as the chassis of a Gonk droid. Perhaps my lapsed faith in Star Wars will finally be restored.

British newcomer Daisy Ridley will help keep Star Wars: Episode VII from turning into a sausage fest.

Hear the music of Star Wars during "AFOS Prime" and "Hall H" on AFOS. Star Wars is represented in both those blocks by the Empire Strikes Back score cues "The Battle of Hoth" and "The Rebel Fleet/End Title," by John Williams, who's returning to score Episode VII.

Attack the Block is the best summer movie you've never heard of

Edgar Wright is a filmmaker whose film and TV work I've enjoyed so much that if the Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz director tells me to jump off a bridge, I'll happily do it, but with a bungee cord tied around me. Or if Wright tells me during Doug Loves Movies or on Twitter to see a movie he co-executive-produced like Attack the Block, I'll go see it, even if it's only playing in eight theaters across the country, and I have to hop on a couple of planes, a train and an automobile to get to one of those theaters (luckily, that theater is the Metreon in San Francisco, so I didn't have to go very far).

I first heard about Attack the Block during a Doug Loves Movies episode recorded at SXSW with last-minute guest Simon Pegg (who showed up without his frequent collaborator Wright by his side but busted out a dead-on impression of his absent friend). At SXSW, Attack the Block was so well-received that Sony Pictures' Screen Gems division acquired it for distribution in America, and since its release last week, everyone from Wright himself to author Nelson George has taken to Twitter to urge everyone to see this little film that Screen Gems has barely advertised on TV. Attack the Block contains a wonderful premise that's never been done before (in a South London ghetto, both a predominantly black teenage gang and the white female nurse they mugged are pitted against extraterrestrial monsters) in a genre that's been done to death (the alien invasion genre--between the Steven Spielberg-produced TNT drama Falling Skies and three other Spielberg productions, Super 8, Transformers: Dark of the Moon and Cowboys & Aliens, aliens have had a busy summer). The directorial debut of British comedian Joe Cornish (who also wrote the screenplay), the low-budget actioner has no familiar faces in the cast, aside from Venus star Jodie Whittaker and Wright regular Nick Frost in a comedic bit part as a weed dealer, and most of the stars speak in lower-class British accents as thick as Dizzee Rascal's (for folks like me who are familiar with artists like Dizzee or The Streets, that kind of accent isn't too difficult to decipher, but for the rest of the moviegoing audience in America, it's like Klingon). So no wonder Screen Gems is giving Attack the Block a limited release and cautiously unveiling it to an audience that prefers their alien-invasion flicks to be bigger-budgeted, smoother-accented and well, let's face it, dumber.

Okay, Attack the Block isn't quite Shakespeare, but it has a certain inventiveness and vitality that's missing from all those aforementioned Spielberg-produced 2011 alien-invasion projects that aren't Super 8, although the treacly Falling Skies is redeemed by the presence of Colin Cunningham's not-so-treacly biker character Pope. Cornish's film takes its cues less from Spielberg and more from both Frost's previous film Shaun of the Dead and early John Carpenter, particularly one of my favorite Carpenter movies, the original Assault on Precinct 13, from its ghetto backdrop to its unconventional choice of a hero, a black wannabe thug who's like a mash-up of Precinct 13's two leads, Austin Stoker's untested black cop and Darwin Joston's antiheroic white convict. (Voice actor Yuri Lowenthal of Ben 10 fame calls Attack the Block "the best John Carpenter movie that John Carpenter never made.") Unknown John Boyega is a star in the making in his charismatic debut as Moses (when a mugging victim escapes from him and his gang, dig the way Boyega's laconic character simply commands his gang in his thick accent to "allow it," which must be his favorite phrase). Attack the Block is also like what would have happened if the showrunners of Falling Skies realized it was a mistake to make Noah Wyle's rather blandly written history professor character Mason the lead of the show and decided to shift the focus to Pope. At the start of Attack the Block, Moses is first seen doing something very Pope-like and not-so-heroic--he and his gang are mugging Whittaker's nurse character Sam--when he spots a meteorite crash-landing in his hood, and Moses, distracted by the meteorite and the dog-like creature it carried, runs off to kill the monster, not realizing that his killing of the beastie will ignite an alien invasion.

Moses' trajectory from irresponsible thug to adult who decides to own up to his mistakes and clean up the mess he started when he killed the monster is believable and compelling, thanks to Boyega. He has a couple of intriguing little moments where the badass and authoritative gang leader façade disappears, and with some great acting by Boyega with just his eyes, we see a scared kid who's in over his head and whom the film later reveals--in one of its best scenes--to be much younger than he appears to be.

Another Carpenter-esque element is newcomer Steven Price's effective score, which evokes both instrumental hip-hop and Carpenter's synthesizer scores from his Precinct 13/Halloween heyday. The electronica duo Basement Jaxx brings some star power to the score, which Jaxx co-wrote with Price. (Selections from the Attack the Block score will be added to the Fistful of Soundtracks blocks "Assorted Fistful," "New Cue Revue" and "The Street" in the near future.)

Attack the Block has four (or five or six or seven or eight) less screenwriters than Cowboys & Aliens and was made at a budget that's 10 times less than C&A's, and yet it has a smarter and better-constructed story. One of the cleverest touches in Cornish's script is the symmetry of Moses gaining a better understanding of the grizzly bear-like aliens (and why they're attacking him and everyone around him)(*) with Sam gaining a better understanding of her mugger Moses, who's basically an alien to her. Attack the Block is also about the "aliens" in our own neighborhoods due to racial and class divisions. Forced to turn to Sam for help when one of his cohorts gets injured during an alien attack, Moses realizes the stupidity of picking on good citizens like Sam, while Sam, along with the audience, discovers Moses' kind and vulnerable side, which Tia (Danielle Vitalis), a female friend of the gang's, already sees in Moses, whom Tia has an unspoken crush on. (Here's another reason to dig Attack the Block: it would probably cause that racist dickcheese Lou Dobbs to get his panties in a bunch over the kinds of characters it chooses to sympathize with.) Of course, by the film's climax, Sam and Moses no longer hate each other (enemies who are forced to put aside their differences to fight alien invaders is a thread that also appears in C&A), but Attack the Block wisely avoids the "Mookie and Sal hug and become friends and sing 'We Are the World'" ending that Paramount forced on Spike Lee when he pitched Do the Right Thing to them. Attack the Block is smarter and more ambiguous than that.

(*) I like Attack the Block's version of those pipe-smoking scientist characters in sci-fi B-movies who spout nothing but exposition and were memorably parodied by Pierce Brosnan in Mars Attacks! Instead of regular tobacco, Luke Treadaway's dorky white trust-fund kid Brewis prefers weed--and the sounds of KRS-One on his iPod--and is a zoology student who's watched enough National Geographic specials while baked to figure out why the aliens are invading the block and how to defeat them.

What also makes Attack the Block stand out from this year's batch of alien-invasion flicks is the absence of CGI (I'm not vehemently against CGI--I'm just against it when it's done poorly, which is way too often). All the creature effects in Cornish's film are practical. The alien attacks are fast and brutal, and this is a case where the fast-cutting that so many critics complain about when they see present-day action movies is absolutely necessary because here, it prevents us from noticing how cheap-looking the monsters are--they're essentially just guys running around in eyeless and coal-black bear suits outfitted with ginormous blue neon teeth. But because the Attack the Block aliens aren't CG, there's a realness and formidability to them that's missing from the CG creatures in films like Ang Lee's Hulk and Louis Leterrier's Incredible Hulk reboot, which both contain monster battles I've failed to get invested in and have found to be a chore to watch because the CGI in those sequences is as fake-looking as the cel-animated flying sequences in the '40s live-action Superman serials.

I'm not so worried about the fate of Attack the Block during its theatrical release here in America (though it played to a largely empty theater when I saw it, Screen Gems will expand its release to six more cities on August 19) because like other recent cult films that didn't attract huge crowds during their initial release, it'll eventually find a much bigger audience on Blu-ray and DVD. For now, it's a best-kept secret among us fans of little films that outshine most of the better-known and somewhat similar blockbusters they're competing against at the box office.