Attack the Block: The Council-Estate Alien Siege

The tower is called Wyndham. Joe Cornish puts the name on the building in the first reel and then never mentions it again, which is the most confident thing in his debut feature: he tells you exactly which shelf he has taken the film down from and trusts you to either get it or enjoy yourself anyway. John Wyndham wrote the invasions that happen to Britain rather than to America — the ones where the extraordinary arrives in a village, a suburb, a place with a bus timetable, and the locals have to deal with it using whatever is in the shed. Attack the Block is that book, set on an estate, on Bonfire Night, starring five teenagers who have just mugged a nurse.

That mugging is the film’s opening move and its whole moral engine. Sam (Jodie Whittaker) is walking home; Moses (John Boyega) and his four mates surround her, take her phone and her ring, and Cornish shoots it from her side of the knife — close, fast, genuinely frightening. Ninety seconds later something falls out of the sky into a parked car, and the film spends the next eighty minutes asking whether you can be made to cheer for the boy who did that. It is a hell of a bet to open with, and Cornish wins it by refusing to soften a single thing about the first scene.

The economy of the block

Cornish came to this from The Adam and Joe Show, where he and Adam Buxton restaged blockbusters using soft toys — a training in exactly the discipline a two-million-pound alien invasion requires. He had also co-written The Adventures of Tintin for Spielberg by the time this reached screens, which is a useful fact to hold against the film: the man knew precisely how much a real spectacle costs and built a picture that never asks for one.

Everything happens in and around one tower. Corridors, a lift, a stairwell, a flat, a chicken shop, a bike, a bin. The geography is established early and honoured completely — you know where the top floor is relative to the front doors, you know which route the boys will take, and so the chases have consequence rather than momentum. This is the Carpenter siege structure applied to social housing: a defined perimeter, a shrinking interior, and a besieged group who dislike each other. Assault on Precinct 13 is the obvious blueprint and Cornish has never denied it. He inherits the essentials — the countdown, the failed escape, the enemy who cannot be reasoned with — and adds the one thing Carpenter never had, which is that his defenders are children.

They really are children, and the film keeps remembering it at the worst moments. Boyega was nineteen and had never carried a feature; he plays Moses with a stillness that reads first as menace and slowly resolves into exhaustion, a fifteen-year-old doing an impression of a hard man because the alternative is being a fifteen-year-old on that landing. Alex Esmail’s Pest supplies the film’s comic engine and its most sudden fear. Cornish cast largely from open auditions in South London youth clubs and workshopped the dialogue with local teenagers, and the slang carries the specific weight of language nobody in the production was clever enough to invent.

Nick Frost is in it as a small-time weed grower with a grow room and no useful opinions, and the casting is a signal flare: Big Talk produced, Nira Park produced, Edgar Wright executive-produced. This is the same workshop that built Shaun of the Dead, and it shares that film’s method — take a beloved American genre, run it through a British postcode, and let the friction produce the jokes.

Never light the monster

The creature design is the reason the film has outlasted its cohort, and it comes from a rule rather than a budget line. Cornish’s aliens are pitch black. Not dark — black, an absence, fur that has been built to swallow light entirely, with no eyes and nothing to read except a mouth of glowing blue-green teeth when the jaws open. They are silhouettes with a light source inside them.

That decision does three separate jobs at once. It solves the money problem: a shape that reflects nothing needs almost no rendering, and performers in suits can carry the movement while the digital work is confined to the jaws. It solves the staging problem: a black shape against a dark stairwell can be anywhere, so Tom Townend’s camera never has to sell a threat it cannot afford to show. And it solves the design problem that has ruined a thousand creature features, which is that a monster you can see clearly is a monster you can measure.

This is the restraint principle executed with unusual rigour, and it stands as one of the better arguments in the long fight over what was lost when the man in the suit was retired. Cornish did not choose between practical and digital. He designed a creature whose entire visual identity is the seam between them, and then hid the seam in the dark.

The Basement Jaxx score does the matching trick with sound. Felix Buxton and Simon Ratcliffe, working with Steven Price, built a soundtrack out of the music that would actually be playing on that estate — bass weight, sirens, a synth line that could be a ringtone — and it sits so naturally in the world that you stop noticing when diegetic sound becomes score. The fireworks do the same work visually. Bonfire Night is the film’s cheapest and best idea: on 5 November, a South London estate is already full of bangs, screams and things exploding in the sky, and nobody comes.

The argument the film was accused of, and the one it makes

Attack the Block premiered at SXSW in March 2011 and opened in Britain that May. Some of the reaction was that it glamourised the boys; some of it was that its heroes should not have been muggers; a strand of the coverage could not get past the accents. Then in August the riots happened, and the film’s stock changed overnight — the same picture, re-read as prophecy by people who had dismissed it as noise.

Both readings miss what Cornish actually built. The film does not redeem Moses through heroism, and it does not excuse him. It puts him in a corridor with something that wants to eat him and observes that his skills — the running, the reading of sightlines, the absolute refusal to show fear — are the skills of a boy who has been rehearsing a siege his whole life. The most damning line in the film is Moses’s own explanation of where he thinks the aliens came from and who he thinks sent them, delivered flat, as a reasonable inference from the evidence available to him. It is a joke and it is a diagnosis, and Cornish does not underline it.

The honest case against is that Sam is under-served. Whittaker plays the film’s only adult with a conscience and the script keeps needing her to be a hostage, a first-aider, or a witness. Her turn from victim to ally is dramatically necessary and comes about twenty minutes faster than a human being would manage. Luke Treadaway’s posh customer is a one-joke device stretched across the running time. And the film’s back half tips into an action rhythm that flattens some of the terror the first act earned.

The real ancestor

Everyone says Assault on Precinct 13, and everyone is half right. The truer ancestor is Village of the Damned — Wolf Rilla’s 1960 film of Wyndham’s The Midwich Cuckoos, where an alien intrusion is handled by a small English community with committee meetings and quiet dread, and where the horror is domestic rather than continental. Cornish put Wyndham’s name on the tower because that is the lineage he is claiming. Washington never gets flattened in this tradition. The thing lands in the car park of the place you live, and it is dealt with by whoever happens to be outside.

The other thread runs back to The Quatermass Xperiment and forward to Monsters — British science fiction’s habit of putting the impossible in a place with a postcode and no budget for spectacle. Cornish’s contribution is to notice that the postcode had people in it who had never been given the torch.

Boyega went to a galaxy far away four years later and Whittaker got the TARDIS. Watch it now for what it was before either of those things: a debut that knew exactly what it could not afford and built a monster out of the gap.

Spoilers below

Everything past here assumes you have seen it.

The plot mechanic that snaps the film shut is the pheromone. The first creature to land — small, hairless, a nuisance — was female, and Moses kills it in the opening act and hauls the corpse around like a trophy. Every black-furred male that comes down afterwards is following her scent, which is now on Moses, on his clothes, on the flat he drags her into. The invasion is a mating run, and the boys are the reason it is happening in that building.

That reveal transforms the film’s ethics on a second viewing. Moses spends the whole picture being blamed by everyone — the police, Hi-Hatz, Sam — for things that are and are not his fault, and the one accusation that turns out to be literally true is the one nobody makes until he works it out himself. His last act is not an apology. It is a calculation: he is the beacon, so he becomes the bait, going up the outside of his own tower with the corpse strapped to him and a flare in his hand while the fireworks go off behind him. Cornish shoots the climb in silhouette against a wall of light, and it is the single best image in British genre cinema of that decade.

The deaths land hard because Cornish refuses to protect anyone. Dennis and Jerome go without ceremony, mid-sentence, in the middle of an escape that should have worked — the film’s structure had promised us the group would thin out at the pace of an action movie, and it does not. Hi-Hatz’s end is the closest the film comes to a punchline and even that is soured by how small he suddenly looks. Biggz spends the entire siege inside a wheelie bin, which is played for comedy until you register that the youngest child in the film survived by hiding in the rubbish for an hour.

And then the coda: Moses arrested, in the back of a van, cuffed, while the estate outside starts chanting his name. Cornish holds on Boyega’s face while the noise builds — no swell, no smile, no vindication — and cuts. The system that arrives at the end of the film is the same system that was never there during it. That closing shot is why the August that followed made everybody rewatch it.