What Is It?A sci-fi comedy about a group of teenagers who have to defend their housing project when it's attacked by aliens. It’s also my favorite movie on this list by a mile.
Watch It If You Like: British comedies in the strain of Edgar Wright’s Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz. Wright executive produced Attack the Block, and he and Attack the Block writer/director Joe Cornish are re-teaming for another movie you may have heard of: Ant-Man. (Wright is directing, Cornish is writing.)
"OK, Sell Me": One: It’s hilarious. Some of the accents are quite heavy, so it can be hard to catch the dialogue. Put on subtitles. It’s worth it.
Two: It has great acting, especially from John Boyega, who plays gang leader Moses.
Three: It features some of the best, most innovative creature design to hit my eyeballs in a long damn time. Attack the Block is a low-budget movie, so Cornish & co. didn’t have a lot to work with when crafting the aliens referred to by the characters as “alien gorilla wolf motherf***ers.” They're basically shadows with glow-in-the-dark mouths. But they’re approximately 58 thousand times scarier, cooler, and just better than that sounds.
And finally: You might not think it of a sci-fi comedy with repeated use of the phrase "alien gorilla wolf motherf***ers," but Attack the Block has better, more insightful things to say about racism and classism than most movies about racism and classism. But it's not preachy or heavy-handed about it. You're just watching this funny, occassionaly violent movie about teens fighting off aliens, and then you slowly begin to realize… Moses and his friends have to deal with the alien invasion themselves, because they live in a low-income, primarily black area, and the government doesn't really care what happens to them unless it's something the police can arrest them for. Huh. This movie’s pretty deep.
And then the final scene comes, and with it feels.
And finally, the most important thing: It it on Netflix Instant? No. Buy it on iTunes or track down the DVD to rent, if you happen to be near one of the ever-dwindling number of rental stores. Do it. Do it now.
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