Joe Cornish's low-budget creature-feature Attack the Block is a charmer, a delight, the kind of rare film--like Jack Sholder's The Hidden, Stuart Gordon's Re-Animator, or Steve De Jarnatt's Miracle Mile--that devotees will latch onto, and for good reason, with the fervour afforded genuine cult classics. It has energy to burn, a strange affinity with E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial, and a super-cool monster that looks like a cross between Ira from the "Moonshadow" comic and a grizzly bear. That most of it was carried off with practical effects is a shot in the arm for practical effects and a bearer of the nostalgia banner that seems to be popular lately, what with our dreams and memories fodder again for the celluloid couch. Better still, it introduces a new star into the future pantheon in John Boyega, who has charisma to burn as gang leader-cum-saviour Moses. The movie's tale of a group of street toughs has drawn comparisons to The Warriors, but I think the better analogy is Spielberg's E.T., not just in that alchemy between the fantastic and the absolutely mundane (South England's Lambeth neighbourhood), but also in the crafting of a living youth subculture alive with its own language, ritual, and custom. It's not too much to say that, at its best, Attack the Block makes you feel the way you did when the guys took things into their own hands to deliver the flying, omniscient, omnipotent E.T. to his landing site. It taps into the irrational cool. Which doesn't happen very often.

A curious thing that Cornish's film introduces his aliens as meteorites striking Lambeth during bonfire night, as William Blake had Milton returning to Earth (to Lambeth, as it happens) in a comet in his epic "Milton a Poem" in order to unite Blake, in part, with his cultural antecedents. Not to stretch the comparison too far, Attack the Block is likewise a survey that pulls elements from favourite films and does so in a way very much like Quentin Tarantino's and producer Edgar Wright's exercises in pop-culture revisionism. Cornish has crafted a film that owes a great deal to stuff like Aliens and An American Werewolf in London and trusted it to a group of untested kids who feel absolutely organic to their situation. When they encounter the first beastie in the back of a parked car, they of course follow it into the park to finish it off when cooler heads would have left well enough alone. There's a racial element, and a socio-economic one represented by the mugging of--and subsequent capitulation with--nurse Sam (Jodie Whittaker) that is treated with the respect of leaving it in the subtext until an ambiguous coda that's moving and pointed. Best, Cornish gives Sam a moment alone in Moses's flat, allowing us to gain a little foothold into the situation that's led to the creation of this particular hero. He's not unlike The Evil Dead's Ash in some ways, (a non-descript schlub who finds his true calling killing demons and zombies), but with the tantalizing hint that any message there might be about finding oneself is wrapped in a more meaningful redemption. Leaving that aside, Attack the Block is exciting, fun, and puerile in exactly the appropriate way, so that even a cameo by Nick Frost doing what he always does (this time as the assistant to a drug kingpin) can't defuse the liveliness of a kid on a moped getting run down by a grizzly bear with neon teeth.

The focus, though, rests on the wistful one who's lost his mother, Joe (Joel Courtney), son of small-town deputy Lamb (Kyle Chandler) and inheritor, at least on Charles's undead opus, of Dick Smith's makeup legacy. The centre of this live-action remake of The Iron Giant, Joe sort of befriends the It that escapes from a brilliant train crash that happens just outside his tiny burg. Super 8 isn't a boy-and-his-robot story like Tobor the Great (or Terminator 2), but it is a full-hearted attempt to recapture the magic of those early-eighties summers where every movie seemed to have about it the feeling of youth in amber. The titular film stock represents both the catalyst for the picture's conflict and the medium that conveys the solution of the piece (as well as, in one mawkish sequence, Joe's memories of his mother). I guess what I'm saying is, the cast is brilliant--consistently better than the film itself, which is saying something, because the film isn't bad--and the use of old camera technology suggests a nostalgia not merely for the days when the Walkman heralded the end of western civilization, but for the days when film held the possibility of truth instead of the certainty of trickery. Ironic, perhaps, that Abrams would hark back to the pre-CGI age, given that the monster he sticks into the last half-hour of Super 8 is wholly a phantom (and that the film's tearjerker is a mainframe lightshow). It's a bit of a shame, too, because wouldn't it have been great if the picture, like Ti West's awesome House of the Devil, were almost indistinguishable from the films it's seeking to honour?

Anchoring it all is the complete sweetness and utter believability of Joe's infatuation with Alice and, in one great scene, the pain of Deputy Lamb as he realizes he's failed his son in the immediate aftermath of the loss of his son's mother. The good parts outweigh the bad, the moments nailed--such as Alice's auto-transformation into a zombie and a siege in a converted school bus (they're going to need a bigger bus, n'est-ce pas?)--making up for the picture's carelessness with its ancillary characters and the maddening looseness of its plot. It's better not to ask life-and-death questions, better not to wonder if the It is building a ship (like it was in Carpenter's The Thing) or simply a giant magnet for reasons that will come clean in a way that doesn't entirely feel clean, given that there's no possible reason for the military to be bringing the things It might want to attract with a magnet anywhere near where a magnet may attract it. And, really, don't ask why it is that some metal things are attracted to the is-it-a-magnet and not others. Is it a sentient magnet? I just told you: best not to ask. Super 8 ultimately isn't about sense, it's an exercise in tapping that irrational cool of hanging out with your pals, of being in love with the most beautiful girl you've ever seen (and she drives!), and of making something that feels, for a brief period of time, like the most important thing you're ever going to do. It doesn't sustain those emotions, but it will sometimes remind you of movies that do.-Walter Chaw

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Published: June 10, 2011