Rereviewing Attack the Block: a Second Opinion
The re-Meat
Do you want
to know why Superman Returns was so
underwhelming whereas The Dark Knight
rocked so hard? (I'll bet Bryan Singer
does!) I'm convinced it's because
Superman is such a good good guy. Sure, that sort of squeaky clean image probably
appealed to older generations, people under the shadow of the Cold War and whatnot. But characters like Superman have little
resonance with today's youth, who prefer that their heroes have a healthy streak of
bad in them.
Why is
that? The truth is good guys have great difficulty
undergoing on-screen character development, since after all how can a morally
pure character experience a real dilemma, or break his unwavering commitment to
right conduct? That's probably why, in
the Christopher Reeve superman movies, they had to invent the notion of him
wrestling with becoming human in Superman
2. But that didn't work out either,
because if there's one thing even less interesting than a totally good
superhero, it's a totally good person who's also totally ordinary.
This brings
us to 2011's Attack the Block, about
which The G wrote a scathing review. Am
I here to pick apart every claim The G makes and show where he's wrong? Not at all.
In fact, I agree with almost all his statements about the film—namely,
that it's trying too hard to be cool/edgy, that the supernatural
threat the gang of street kids faces is kind of lame, and most importantly,
that none of the characters is sympathetic in any straightforward sense. Where we differ is in our reactions to this
final fact: he found it a huge obstacle to enjoying the film, whereas I thought
it was the movie's strongest feature.
The main
characters are definitely not good guys. They're crude thugs; the audience can't
possibly feel that they have right on their side, which certainly makes rooting
for them difficult.
In fact, upon seeing their antics, we viewers might end up looking rather like these characters:
But therein lies the
movie's special challenge to the viewer: what if, when the bad guys come, the
only ones who humanity can scrounge up to face them are a bunch of lowlife
punks? Isn't the "punk versus alien" idea less well-traveled than the
White Knight versus Total Evil paradigm? Instead of a beacon of justice, we get
a loser and his lame crew, teetering on the edge of becoming straight-up
criminals, nudged back from said edge only by the bizarre circumstances. They
might be almost cartoonish caricatures of British wannabe American tough guys, but
somehow listening to their almost unintelligibly slang-ridden bouts of
braggadocio felt more fun than yet another "these aliens picked on the
wrooooong American!" trope.
Speaking of
which, it's wonderful to have a movie (that doesn't totally suck, like the recent
rash of terrible Russian sci fi movies about flying cars and sentient ball
lightning and who knows what) in the all-too-familiar alien invasion sub-genre which
isn't set in, or about, America (though minus one for, culturally, becoming so like the monster they are trying to overcome). That
said, this movie isn't on the same level as District
9 or 28 Days Later, but I'd happily
re-watch Attack the Block over quite
a long list of alien/disaster movies.
And if all
else fails and you still find yourself wishing the film would end, take heart:
it's short! The soundtrack helps the movie maintain its zippy pace, and the
producers were smart enough to get the film down to just 82 minutes not
including credits, which means we don't quite have time to lose interest in the
characters or the situation. Plus Nick
Frost is at his dazed best!
All in all,
Attack the Block doesn't really live
up to the critical acclaim it's received, but the makers can always chuckle to
themselves that, with a mere 1/16 of the budget, they succeeded where Bryan
Singer's lackluster Superman totally failed!
The re-Math:
The G's original score: 2/10
Zhaoyun's take:
Objective quality: 4/10
Bonuses: +1 for anti-hero punks, +1 for not America, +1 for
brevity
Penalties: -1 for the trying too hard to be cool/American
thing, -1 for lame aliens
Nerd Coefficient: 5/10 "Equal parts good and bad"
[See an explanation of our non-inflated scores here]
