Attack the Block: Environmental Sci Fi Comedy

Written and directed by first time filmmaker Joe Cornish, Attack the Block (2011) follows a teen gang in South London as they defend their block from an alien invasion. Cornish gives an Indie feel to the comic science fiction genre by setting an alien invasion in a council estate in South London on Guy Fawkes bonfire night, casting wannabe gangsters as the heroes who defeat the low-tech yet menacing aliens, and integrating a scientific reason for their attack.  But the film takes this genre further by including at least two intersections humans and the environment: an exploration of the impact of a “lifeless” urban environment on children and young adults and an alien motivation that is explicitly connected with the natural world.

The council estate apartment building, which serves as the primary setting for the film, establishes a cold stark tone to the film with its sparsely lit narrow hallways serve as hollow caverns. Overhead lights blink on and off, their fluorescent gray glow encouraging multiple cast shadows.  Outside the building, dark streets are interrupted only by exploding fireworks and bonfires commemorating Guy Fawkes, who attempted to overthrow England’s King James I in 1605. The explosions also mask the alien invasion, since trails of light from the alien ships and their blasts on impact blend with flowering pyrotechnics surrounding the city serving as a disguise for the entrance of the frightening sightless alien creatures with glowing fangs.

Like Guy Fawkes, these aliens’ attempts to “overthrow” the council estate block are thwarted, but this time the heroic champions are teen thugs, who enter the film as a “gang” when they mug Sam (Jodie Whittaker), a nursing intern. The gang’s leader, Moses (John Boyega), comes off as a tough urban hood, even when the crime is interrupted by an exploding car. When Moses and his boys investigate, instead of finding the remnants of fireworks, Moses is attacked by a small creature, which then runs into the darkness. Instead of  letting it run away, as they did with Sam, Moses and the gang chase the creature and kill it, carrying it to their adult friend and drug dealer, Ron (Nick Frost) for advice about selling it on e-bay.

In this scene, these boy thugs seem to be constructed by their harsh urban environment, products of the lifeless world around them. As Andrew Ross argues, mainstream environmentalists view the city as a monstrous savage (“Social Claim on Urban Ecology” 16), so the contrasting idea of an environmentalism grounded in the city—an urban eco-criticism—may be, as Ross puts it, “an oxymoron” (“Social Claim on Urban Ecology” 16). For Ross, urban eco-criticism would embrace “environmental priorities that affect urban residents, like sanitation, rat and pest control, noise pollution, hunger, malnutrition, poor health, premature death, not to mention the conditions that underpin these hazards, like the slashing of public services and the savage inequities of public housing policies” (“Social Claim on Urban Ecology” 15).  Attack the Block begins to interrogate these issues by setting a typical science fiction narrative in a low-income urban housing project.

When the teen gang turns into the heroic team that defeats the alien attack, the stereotypes about the savage urban environment and its effect on residents is turned on its head. These thugs are actually sons of working mothers with goals outside their initial criminal actions, and they have a fierce loyalty for their “block” and wish to defend it. Ultimately, they even team up with their mugging victim, Sam, to defeat the aliens.

But it is Moses who leads the fight, based on a second and, perhaps, more important connection with the natural world explored in the film:  pheromones as a motivation for the aliens’ attack. Pheromones are introduced in the film during the first scene in Ron’s apartment where a nerdish pot smoker, Brewish (Luke Treadaway) watches a nature program on the community television. With the other boys’ banter in the background, we here a voiceover explain how moths are drawn to their future mate’s pheromones.

The message makes sense later, when Brewish, who also seems to have excelled in zoology classes, notices a luminescent liquid on Moses’ jacket and connects it with the program: the alien Moses killed must have been a female, he theorizes, and left a pheromone on him that the other aliens have been tracking. After Moses connects other alien attacks with his own interaction with victims, he agrees and, like a metaphorical Moses, leads the aliens away from his friends, and they follow the scent of pheromones on his jacket to their deaths.

These environmental messages in the film connect well with its deviations from the comic science fiction genre to make it an Indie-like treat to watch.  As Joshua RothKopf of Time Out New York explains, “You can enjoy this movie as the meat-and-potatoes sci-fi flick it is, or, as with District 9, probe it for the elements of class consciousness and political rage that its makers smuggle in, like the best of subverters.”