In movies, science fiction has nearly always been dominated by a primarily white cast. Characters of different races, such as the Black coworker or the Asian IT geek, were virtually always marginalized. Men in Black and Blade were anomalies, but their success opened the door for a slew of additional films.
‘Attack the Block,’ a 2011 British science fiction comedic horror film directed by Joe Cornish, breathes new life into the genre by including cultural diversity and representation. It is not every day that we get to watch a black man play the lead role in a film, like in the case of Moses, starring John Boyega. Cornish, who wrote and directed the film, did not limit the variety of his cast to one black lead role.
The story follows a street gang in London as they combat extraterrestrial invaders on Guy Fawkes Night.
With this film, Joe Cornish and John Boyega made their big-screen debuts. Jodie Whittaker plays Samantha, Franz Drameh plays Dennis, Alex Esmail plays Pest, Nick Frost plays Ron, Leeon Jones plays Jerome, Jumayn Hunter plays Hi-Hatz, Simon Howard plays Biggz, and Luke Treadaway plays Brewis in the film.
The film has won numerous awards at renowned film festivals across the world, including the Los Angeles Film Festival, SXSW 2011, and the Torino Film Festival. And now you will understand why. So, without further ado, let us go straight into the video!
Plot: Summary
The movie begins as trainee nurse Samantha Adams (played by Jodie Whittaker) walks home through Brixton on Guy Fawkes’ night. She is mugged by a gang from the hood – Dennis (played by Franz Drameh), Pest (played by Alex Esmail), Jerome (played by Leeon Jones), Biggz (played by Simon Howard), and their leader Moses (John Boyega).
Replacing cops due to their incompetence in protecting the people, Samantha is instead, ‘saved’ by a meteorite crashing onto a car. She escapes as Moses scurries through the car to find something valuable. A creature suddenly scratches him. It was pale, hairless (ah yes, 18th-century beauty standard for women), eyeless, and dog-sized. Apparently, the ‘meteorite’ in question was its cocoon.
It runs away but the gang chases it and kills it. They expect to get money for its corpse and take it to Ron (played by Nick Frost), their weed dealer, for advice on what to do with it. Moses asks Ron and Hi-Hatz (aka Jumayn Hunter) i.e. Ron’s boss and local gangster, to keep it in the ‘weed room’.
More creature cocoons fall from the sky and since the gang wants to secure the bag, they arm themselves and go to the crash site to get more of them but this time, the creatures were almost gorilla-sized and had pitch black spiky fur with glowing fangs and huge claws. They run away and two policemen catch them. They identify Moses as a mugger as Samantha had filed a complaint against him and arrested him.
The aliens attack the police and their van, killing them, as Moses is trapped inside with Samantha. Dennis drives the car away and crashes it into Hi-Hatz’s car. Samantha flees while the gang catches up to confront Hi-Hatz, who is now enraged due to the car damage. He threatens the gang with a gun and refuses to believe their story about the aliens but then, a creature attacks one of his henchmen and the gang flees.
They try to get to Wyndham Tower only to find more aliens chasing them. Biggz hides in a dumpster while Pest is bitten in the leg. Turns out, Samantha lives in Wyndham Tower so they force themselves into her apartment and try to convince her to treat Pest’s leg. Just then, an alien comes in and Moses drives a samurai sword into his head. He finds that sword because plot armor is keeping him alive.
Samantha realizes that their alien story was in fact, true and that staying with them would’ve been safer than being alone because all aliens are bad and the villains and humans are good and the heroes, you know the drill. They all move upstairs to the apartment of girls they know, but of course, the aliens attack them once again by climbing the tower block and smashing the windows.
One alien bites Dennis through his helmet, crushing his skull, and killing him. Another one tries to kill Moses but he splits the water in half and the creature has a spiritual awakening. No, that didn’t happen. Samantha stabs it through the head and saves Moses.
The girls realize that the aliens are targeting the gang so they just kick them out to save themselves. But just then, Hi-Hatz and his henchmen, the toms, cymbals, bass drums, and kicks attack the gang in the hall. They escape and an alien runs after Hi-Hatz and his gang into an elevator. Hi-Hatz kills it but his crew dies.
The gang makes it to Ron’s weed room and finds more aliens. They use fireworks as a distraction and manage to escape. Maybe the aliens were feeling like a plastic bag, drifting through the winds, wanting to start again.
Jerome gets killed by an alien while the rest of them find Hi-Hatz in Ron’s flat. He prepares to shoot Moses, a blasphemy if you ask me, but aliens smash into Hi-Hatz and tear his face off. Moses, Samantha, and Pest are joined by Brewis (who is Ron’s customer) and they go back to the weed room while Ron hides in the flat.
Brewis uses ultraviolet light and finds a luminescent stain on Moses’ jacket. He comes up with the theory that the aliens were like spores that drifted through space on solar winds until they landed on a habitable planet. Once they chance upon an area with enough food, the female lets off strong pheromones to attract the males for mating and multiplying their species because they are not yet aware of the risks of overpopulation.
Moses makes the gang return the ring they had stolen from Samantha and they formulate a plan. She goes to Moses’ flat and turns on the gas oven. She bypasses the aliens since she did not have the pheromones on her and leaves the tower block. Moses straps the corpse of a small alien to his back, making it the latest hot look for the runways, and runs to the gassy apartment. The aliens follow him because they thought it was the female due to the pheromones. Damn, they’re thirsty.
Moses throws the alien corpse there and ignites the room with fireworks, leaping out of the window (baby you’re a firework just got real). The place explodes. The aliens and the rest of the block are now on fire.
Moses, Ron, Pest, and Brewis are arrested in the end for causing the deaths of people around the block. When the cops ask Samantha to identify them, she defends them by saying that they were her neighbors and protected her. While sitting in the police van, Moses and Pest hear the residents of the block cheering for Moses and they smile. The movie ends.
Something cool about the filming of this movie is that director Joe Cornish interviewed several kids to find out what kind of weapons they’d use during an alien invasion. He had also asked one of the girls what she would think of this creature if she found it. She replied that she wouldn’t touch it because she did not want to get chlamydia. That dialogue went straight into the script.
What Exactly Is This Alien-Like?
The aliens in the movie make their appearance when they crash land on Earth in cocoons resembling meteorites while a local gang attempted to mug a trainee nurse. They do not have a name though but they are in fact, a species. It’s not just one alien causing havoc in South London.
The alien creatures in Attack the Block are very animalistic, having long legs. They are all quadrupedal and similar to animals with four legs and possess claws and fangs. However, their fangs are not just any stereotypical fangs. Being extraterrestrial creatures, their physical appearance is quite..out of this world.
They have several rows of fangs that look like they have LED lights implanted in them. Their skin is also pitch black. In fact, it is so black that rarely any light bounces off of it. They do not have visible eyes or noses.
This could be due to two reasons – one, they do not have eyes and noses, similar to Wildmutt from Ben 10 and two, they are so dark that their features are not visible. The neon fangs are probably detrimental to the character design because there has to be some way to make them look visible despite the lack of right reflection and the fangs do just that.
This one is for all my Greek mythology nerds out there. As the bodies of the aliens are just..darkness, it is hard to differentiate between them when they are all together on the spot. You can only count them when their fangs are visible. So, when that happens, they look eerily similar to Cerberus, the hound of Hades. It is a multi-headed dog responsible for guarding the gates of the Underworld.
When the aliens are together, their bodies are barely visible so it looks like a multi-headed dog, growling. In some ways, this character design is very slick. Because sci-fi films require bigger budgets due to requirements such as VFX and CGI, it is very hard to pull off a lower-budget sci-fi film without it looking like a badly produced product, due to the poor CGI. However, Cornish as the writer has played smart in this regard.
By making the aliens so dark that their visibility reduces, the film ultimately ends up saving a lot of money which they would otherwise have to spend in production solely for the alien’s VFX and CGI.
The aliens have their own communication style, using shrieks, sonar, snarls, screams, and growls to interact with one another. As a species, they are sexually dimorphic. The females are as big as a large dog. They are also pale and hairless. Contrary to that, the males are as big as gorillas and have a thick coat of very spiky fur and this fur is pitch black. They are the ones with glowing fangs which can often be mistaken for eyes. The color of their blood is somewhere between black and blue.
During a scene where Brewis uses ultraviolet light on Moses, he learned that there was a luminescent stain on Moses. This caused him to come up with a convincing theory about these extraterrestrial creatures. He believed that these creatures were alien invaders who did not come from any particular planet as such but instead, were spores that floated through space, looking for a planet to infest.
Being sexually dimorphic, the male and female have separate roles in this process. The female search for a habitable planet for the rest of the species and excretes a musk-like fluid, which works similar to how pheromones work in humans. Once the males come to that planet, they detect the female’s fluid and attempt to track her to mate with her. This is because they wish to populate the planet with their own species.
This fluid is not visible to the naked eye but ultraviolet light will detect it. The first creature who appeared in the film was a female itself. Before being killed, it had already excreted its fluid on Moses. This is why, when the males appeared on Earth, they desperately chased him and attacked those around him. And that was also the reason why they could track down the gang no matter how safe they thought they were.
However, it is evident that the species is quite an aggressive one. The female is debatable in this matter because you could argue that she attacked Moses as she was defensive and thought of him as a threat. But with its musk on Moses, it is quite strange why the male creatures were trying to kill him, despite its goal being mating.
Their origin is not known but, I have spent time attempting to theorize where it could’ve come from and then contradicting myself. The dark color of a creature exists due to a higher production of melanin. The melanin production depends on how close one is to the ultraviolet radiation of the sun. This fundamental mechanism is the same in all creatures.
So let us assume that the alien has skin that requires protection, then they obviously originate from a space that is close to the Sun or just about any star in the universe. They also have four legs, which means their origin goes back to a place with gravitational pull. So, they come from a planet or an asteroid similar to Earth, but hotter.
And what other planet could it be than Venus, which is believed to have supported life about 700 million years ago. It is believed that Venus once had a climate similar to that of Earth and possibly supported life for 2 to 3 billion years but due to drastic climatic changes, a runaway greenhouse effect was triggered and today, Venus is incredibly dense, hot, and toxic. Just like your ex.
It could be possible that the creatures are inherently from Venus. Due to its closer proximity to the Sun, it is obviously hotter so their coats are pitch black. But life became unsustainable for them following the destruction of its climate and then, they became spores, drifting through space with the help of solar winds. They possibly developed cocoons to help them deal with the cold and vacuum in space. And as a species, they are just looking to repopulate and exist instead of simply surviving.
However, this can be argued easily because the females are pale. But then, this is just a theory. Brewis himself came up with the trivia on the alien while theorizing. He might be wrong as well. For all we know, we might all be wrong. But it’s fun to think about stuff like this.
What Do We Think About Attack the Block?
When the movie begins, we see the hero Moses, and his gang in an antagonizing light. They are a bunch of thugs from South London, trying to mug an innocent woman on the streets for money. This happens as she turns to an empty street on Guy Fawkes night while trying to get back home. The gang has its faces covered with bandanas while they are on their bikes and are holding a knife to her.
We don’t even know them yet, so the movie initially gives off the vibe that they are villains while Samantha is probably the protagonist. And then the female alien comes in, with its meteorite-Esque cocoon crashing nearby. And then the story gradually begins to pick up.
Cornish asks some very difficult questions to his audience but he does it very subtly. The gang we once demonized for mugging Samantha, the thugs we hated for killing a creature for the sake of fame and fortune, and the hoodlums we were made to demonize simply because we knew nothing about them, finally come to the surface as the plot unravels, and Moses quickly becomes a fan favorite protagonist. We find ourselves actively rooting for him in his fight against alien invaders.
So, how does it correlate to being a social commentary? Countries like the USA and UK are dominated by a white crowd that has often marginalized people of color, and in particular, black people. Several racists use the argument that black people commit more crimes to justify their racism. But, it is important to look deeper into the matter and think about why so many black youths feel the need to take the path of crime.
In modern-day society, the rich get richer. As a marginalized community who have been pushed to certain boundaries, denied equal rights and equal space in society, it is exponentially harder for black people to simply have the same opportunities as their white counterparts.
But money makes the world go round. You need to feed your family and for that, you need money. When you’re in a space that constantly denies you the ability to earn a livelihood decent enough to sustain a family with good living standards or does not give you the necessary education, sometimes you are forced to go down a different path.
In Attack the Block, despite meeting Moses and his gang as a bunch of thugs, we eventually get to know more of them and then begin to side with them. It is quite the same in society. During a scene, Moses and his friend think that the government sent the aliens to their housing project. This shows how poorly they are treated in society. Theories as extreme as this are not born out of thin air. They come from several instances of extreme things happening over and over, which makes the oppressed believe that anything is possible (in the negative sense).
People are doing things out of need but using that as an excuse to call someone dangerous or demonize them is where the problem begins, especially when the reason they take a more unconventional route is caused by the same people who are the critics.
In the end, Moses is the hero as he defeats the real ‘villains’ of the movie. And yet, the police arrest him because in the real world, people will not remember his good deeds, only the bad ones. You can do a thousand good things but one bad action will make everyone forget about all the good. However, he does win the support of many, which leaves a little glimmer of hope for everyone.
Social commentary aside, the movie is entertaining through and through. Not just in an adrenaline-inducing way but also, with its monologues and character interactions. There’s a humor and there is fun. It is ultimately an exciting watch with a morally ambiguous message.
Is There Going To Be A Sequel For Attack the Block?
Joe Cornish and John Boyega met up in the summer of 2020 to discuss a possible sequel for Attack the Block and it is finally happening! The official announcement for this was made on May 17, 2021, even though rumors had been circulating for quite some time.
This announcement also coincided with the movie’s 10-year anniversary. However, no fixed release date has been spoken off..yet. All that is known is that it is set to go into production in 2022 so 2023 sounds like a probable time for its release.
John Boyega is definitely going to reprise his role as Moses. He will most probably be joined by Jodie Whittaker’s Samantha, Alex Esmail’s Pest, and Nick Frost’s Ron. Of course, new cast members will be joining the team as the franchise gets better.
Hopefully, we will get to see the aliens once again, and this time, we might get a backstory about them.
The sequel will probably go down the path of entertainment infused with ambiguous social commentary. As the aliens return, we might see Moses trying to understand what they actually want. We might see a new, softer side to the aliens, and personally, I would love to see Moses bond with them.
To be honest, the first film ended almost with a closure so it does not leave much to the imagination with reference to the alien invasion. But as Moses was sent to jail with Pest, we are likely to get the story of their return. Maybe Samantha helped them out. Or maybe they’ve been serving sentences but a new alien invasion requires Moses’ expertise as he had thwarted the previous one.