I don’t know if I can review Attack the Block the same way I would if I’d seen it a different year. At this point, the alien-invasion thing is just getting ridiculous. Skyline – alien invasion. I Am Number Four – alien invasion. Battle Los Angeles – alien invasion. Transformers 3 – alien invasion. Super 8 – alien. Paul – alien. Battleship – alien invasion. Cowboys and Aliens – alien invasion. Even Green Lantern and Thor are kind of about alien invasions, once you strip away the hot, shaved dudechests. Don’t get me wrong, Attack the Block is a well-made, fun film, and it may be unfair to the director (Joe Cornish, working from his own script) to judge it that way when he probably wrote it years before all the lesser versions drowned out my enthusiasm, but I just don’t know how many more times I need to see aliens destroy a city. The aliens come, the humans have to figure out why they came and what they want, and everyone learns an important lesson. Attack the Block is surely the most competent and least insulting version of this we’ve seen in a while, I’m just not sure that the fact that it happens in English gang turf rather than LA, the old west, the 70s, with robots, or in the ocean is enough variation to recommend it. Though I do feel like I finally understand what Ali G was making fun of, so that’s something

So the aliens, who are like chubby Chewbacca dogs with razor sharp, glowing, rave-party teeth, crash land without benefit of a ship (that’s new, sort of!) in a slummy neighborhood in West South London. In the process, they interrupt a mugging, by a group of mostly-black-but-racially-mixed teenage street toughs on a scared white girl talking on her cell phone. (Analogy for Americans: The girl is basically that toonie bitch Rebecca Hall in The Town trying to gentrify-up the old neighbahhood with a Stahbucks, and the kids are all the little hahd ons from Southie). At first, no one’s quite sure what the aliens want, other than to rave-up peoples’ innards with their dog teeth and terrorize the crew from Dangerous Minds. And since they came down looking like shooting stars on Fireworks Day (whatever the British equivalent of July 4th is) no one realizes Earth’s being invaded. Except the kids, of course, but no one believes them, because in movies, it’s impossible to convince anyone but kooky old ladies and stoners that aliens are invading even if the evidence IS RIGHT IN FRONT OF THEIR GODDAMN STUPID FACE.

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Click to animate (recommended)

After the jump, it’s the first trailer for Universal’s Battleship, which is loosely based on the board game and reportedly cost $200 million to make. I think it looks amazingly terrible, but then I could be biased because I’ve read the script. It stars the poor man’s Chris Pine, Taylor Kitsch as a cocky young blah blah something something aliens come and Rihanna is there. Liam Neeson reprises his role as Guy Who Likes Paychecks, and Alexander Skarsgård is all “HURRR, I’M HANDSOME.” Also, the aliens have jumping battleships in this one. That’s right, JUMPING BATTLESHIPS. It makes sense, because they’re aliens. Hey, Hollywood, maybe it’d be easier to just tell us which movies AREN’T about alien invasions from now on.

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After the jump, I’ve got the new red-band trailer for Attack the Block (“Inner City vs. Outer Space”), a British comedy about an alien invasion that strikes a group of adorably British street toughs in South London (they make up for their lack of guns with rhyming slang).  Directed by Joe Cornish and executive produced by Edgar Wright, it’s been playing to rave reviews among film dorks and finally hits the US (in limited release) July 29th.  If you read my Super 8 review, you probably know that I’m not the best audience for cutesy kid humor and campy aliens (which fanboys love), but I am kind of gay for Edgar Wright and awesome sideways brohawk haircuts. The first time I called it that, someone told me it’s actually called a “Gumby,” but shut up, I like sideways brohawk better.

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The new extended trailer for Cowboys and Aliens premiered the other night on Spike TV’s Guy’s Choice Awards and I missed it, probably because I’d rather watch my grandma’s cakefarts video than regular Spike programming. But now it’s online, and you can watch it below without interruption of Kevin James promos.  Cowboys opens July 29th, and I’m still not sure what to make of it.  While it certainly sounds like Hollywood’s favorite action movie clichés decided to get together and play limp biscuit onto a script, as far as mash-ups of tropes go, I’ll take Cowboys‘ alien invasion, amnesia, rocket hands, and Indiana Jones over Super 8‘s sad kids with daddy issues in love any day (if I find out Daniel Craig keeps his dead wife’s picture in a locket I swear to God I’m walking out). What can I say, I do enjoy aliens and explosions and rocket hands and Olivia Wilde naked (PG-13 naked, of course).  As long as restraint is no object, some dinosaurs, the predator, and a vampire cyborg might’ve been nice. Come on, it’ll be like if Sucker Punch wasn’t secretly about child rape.

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Wow, you guys.  Did I miss the memo that Super 8 was a kids movie?  Because I must admit, with all the hype, the super-secret teaser trailers, the squeals of the Lost fanatic, no-spoiler gestapo (relax, I’m not going to ruin anything for you, freaks), I never heard the part where JJ Abrams was making a really expensive Disney Channel movie.  Because that’s what Super 8 seems to be.  Either that, or a painfully earnest, non-comedic parody of 30-year-old Spielberg films where the hot new element is “LENS FLARES!”

All you really need to know about Super 8 is that at one point, it commits the cardinal sin of “YOU JUST DON’T GET IT, DO YOU!“  But blah blah plot summary wank fart (*snooze*).  Okay, so there’s this group of kids. Each of them has a paper-thin gimmick disguised as characterization.  For instance, there’s a fat kid who says “Mint!” every five seconds, an ugly kid with braces who loves fire, a pussy who vomits, and a protagonist who keeps his dead mom’s locket with him wherever he goes (thank God every dead chick in sh*tty movies carried lockets or else no one would remember them).  All interactions between them seem designed to make sure you don’t forget their central conceit. EXAMPLE:

(*external threat*)

“Have you seen my mom’s locket?”

“MINT!”

(*explosion*)

“AWESOME!”

(*puke, cry*)

(*audience laughter*)

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