attack the block

I think one of the basic underlying themes of Attack the Block is assumptions and the misunderstandings they lead to.

So the film starts with a mugging of a woman by a bunch of kids, but later on it's revealed that the woman lives in the same block (as in block of flats) and they tell her that if they'd known they wouldn't have mugged her.  So they assumed she wasn't part of "their" block and so mugged her.

Later on the explanation of why the aliens are attacking the block and, in particular, the kids, shows how what they had been assuming to be the case is actually false.  I'm trying to avoid spoilers, and I think it's fairly obvious a reveal like that is coming - it's usually the case in this sort of film.

Overall I thought the film basically fulfilled what it was going for.  My only real complaint was with the kids - to me they didn't seem quite real.  I dunno - realistic urban kids is a very difficult thing to pull off.

I mean, part of the problem is that that sort of culture changes incredibly quickly - the kids, after all, grow up and so move through phases very quickly.  This week's cool phrase is next week's cliché.

They attempt to get round that by making the kids dialogue less real and more normal (it would likely be indecipherable if it were really real), but of course that makes the characters feel a little artificial.  Interestingly the kids almost don't swear - it's the adults that have real potty mouths.  Quite why this is I'm not sure, but again, it makes it seem slightly artificial.

In its favour the kids aren't too cookie-cutter.  I mean they are presented to some degree as having "traits" so one is into pyrotechnics and another is a glasses-wearing nerd, but these aren't heavily laid on - think of the characters having preferences, rather than being entirely defined by those things.  They're also all distinctive and memorable.

The above are actually relatively minor - things you can basically ignore or may not actually agree with.  A bigger problem is that, actually, I didn't like the kids.

Having just moaned about them being a bit unrealistic, it's because of what they are trying to get close to (urban miscreants) that I didn't like them.  During a bit where the police showed up I was, I have to confess, rather on the side of the police.

There are also some flaws and problems with the logic and the events - in particular it's not quite clear what's going on outside the focus on the kids.  So the police are there at the end and the residents are outside as if they'd been in and evacuated the residents, but the police only actually seem to enter the building when the armed officers arrive.

Also the internal geography of the flats seems quite mismatched in places and it seems to have a lot more floors on the inside than the outside.  The place also seemed weirdly deserted - particularly given all the people outside at the end.  None of them seemed to interact with the aliens, which seemed a bit odd.

But overall I think it's worth a watch

It's a shame it didn't have any extras on the disk, though.  I would particularly have been interested in how they did the aliens - they were very convincing and it was a clever idea to have them jet black, because I'm guessing the lack of details avoids CGI / model issues.