GRUE MOON & BLOCK PARTY

As Barry Graham points out, this month marks the 109^th anniversary of the premiere of A Trip to the Moon, the pioneering sci-fi film from the great Georges Melies (Turner Classic Movies shows a collection of Melies shorts Monday at 7:45 am Phoenix time). September also marks the release of Apollo 18, a less charming lunar excursion.

Apollo 18, like Cloverfield & Trollhunter, uses the Blair Witch conceit: The premise is that we’re seeing classified footage of an Apollo mission, supposedly scrubbed for budgetary reasons but actually conducted in secret under the auspices of the Department of Defense. The stolid astronauts who land at the lunar south pole soon discover that—gulp—they aren’t alone…

Apollo 18’s opening was rescheduled several times, & Dimension didn’t screen the film for critics (in Phoenix, anyway), so I confess I wasn’t expecting much. The studio’s caution was understandable. I’d be surprised if it became a hit with a wide audience—even at less than an hour and a half, it’s too claustrophobic, oppressive & one-note. But on its own narrow terms, it works, for me at least. The two lead actors (Lloyd Owen & Warren Christie) even though they’re Welsh & Irish, respectively, flawlessly capture the aw-shucks machismo of American astronaut cadences, & the look of ‘70s-era film & video footage is lovingly recreated.

There’s nothing remotely new about the film in terms of sci-fi content, but the director, Gonzalo Lopez-Gallego, generates a strong atmosphere of desolation & dread, & there are some pretty well-timed jolts. There’s even a whisper of political disillusionment worked in.

On the other hand, maybe you’d prefer an earthbound alien invasion…

“Pardon my French,” says the nice middle-aged lady, “but they’re fucking monsters.” She’s speaking of her neighbors, the teenage street punks who haunt the title block in Attack the Block. “Fucking monsters,” echoes the young nurse (Jodie Whittaker) who’s just been mugged by the misunderstood lads in question.

The judgment may seem fair enough, but when literal monsters—shaggy, ferocious quadrupeds from outer space, with blue luminescent fangs—unwisely choose this same block of council flats in South London to drop onto out of the sky, the street kids turn out to be the planet’s first & possibly most effective line of defense. That’s the joke of this headlong, highly exciting sci-fi/horror comedy, written & directed by Joe Cornish.

The alien landing takes place in the middle of Bonfire Night, & goes unnoticed among the fireworks, except by the kids, who arm themselves with ninja swords & bottle rockets & the like, & take to their bikes. The nurse is eventually drawn into a truce with her muggers to fight the common enemy.

Whittaker gives a fine performance, as do Nick Frost as a weed dealer & Nick Treadaway as an upper-crust stoner, but the movie really belongs to the young ne’er-do-wells. Once their faces are out of their hoodies, they’re an engaging, even endearing rabble, & the most glowery of them, Moses (John Boyega), is a born leader. The actors are terrific, but Cornish doesn’t sentimentalize the little sods too much; he even lets them indulge in maudlin sociological self-pity when the nurse challenges them on their criminality. Their fast chatter—unsubtitled & sometimes unintelligible but comprehensible by context—& their swiftly-formed alliances give Attack the Block some of the quality of The Thing From Another World.

The creature effects, though extensive, have a minimalist quality that’s spookily effective—you haven’t seen these aliens before—& the musical score, by Steven Price, Felix Buxton & Simon Ratcliffe, is wonderfully old-school. With Attack the Block, Brit cinema does for the alien movie what Shaun of the Dead did for the zombie movie: Take an American form back to basics &, in a lighthearted but by no means unemotional way, reinvent it.