《环太平洋》

    Starring: Charlie Hunnam, Idris Elba, Rinko Kikuchi, Rob Kazinsky, Max Martini, Ron Perlman

    Director: Guillermo del Toro

    FANBOY euphoria pumped up to gargantuan heights, “Pacific Rim” tells a rather ho-hum story as an excuse to get to the film’s true reason for being: spectacularly epic battle scenes between robots and monsters.

    Director Guillermo del Toro has crafted a dopey, earnest and occasionally visionary sci-fi action film, but it keeps being dragged down by drab characters and indifferent performances. Perhaps that’s fitting for a movie in which humans take a backseat to effects.

    Del Toro’s name will certainly be an asset, thanks to his helming of the “Hellboy” films, “Blade II” and the Oscar-winning “Pan’s Labyrinth,” although “Pacific Rim” will be the most high-profile box-office test of his career.

    Set a little more than 10 years in the future, “Pacific Rim” depicts an on-going battle between humanity and the Kaiju, which are fearsome humongous creatures. They periodically emerge out of the ocean from a breach that connects our world with theirs. To combat the deadly menace, society has constructed Jaegers, massive robots manned by two human pilots who are linked together by a neural pathway.

    But as the Kaiju begin to grow in strength — and their appearances on our planet become more frequent — Earth’s fate is in the hands of the very last Jaegers and a small team of surviving pilots, including one, Raleigh (Charlie Hunnam) who lost his brother in a previous battle with a Kaiju.

    As he’s demonstrated in his comic-book films, del Toro wields a childlike innocence in “Pacific Rim” that makes the life-and-death stakes seem rather weightless. Resembling a kid happily smashing his toys together in the backyard while playing pretend, del Toro’s film has an uncomplicated air about it. (Several of the movie’s less-plausible conceits — such as the puzzling need for humans to man the Jaegers from within the robot — seem to have been decided because they sounded cool.)

    Even when del Toro and his co-writer Travis Beacham lay out some of the characters’ back stories — which include tragic encounters with the Kaiju — it’s impossible to miss the director’s grinning exuberance about getting to level cities and fire endless amounts of missiles in his movie.

    Unfortunately, that enthusiasm doesn’t translate to the cast, who are mostly wooden, undone by clichéd characters familiar from other humanity-versus-aliens survival tales. Hunnam, best known for his role on TV’s “Sons of Anarchy,” doesn’t display the sex appeal, rebelliousness or heroism to make Raleigh’s shot at redemption compelling.

    Additionally, del Toro tries to emphasize the deep connection that Jaeger pilots must share in order to control their robot in sync, but Raleigh and his new co-pilot, Mako (Rinko Kikuchi), exhibit little chemistry or romantic tension. Elsewhere, “Pacific Rim” is filled with predictably gruff commanding officers (Idris Elba) and comic-relief scientists (Charlie Day), but there’s only so much gusto the actors can bring to cardboard creations.

    “Pacific Rim” can be powerfully engaging, once del Toro focuses on full-scale battle scenes, any pretence of character depth or dramatic nuance is stripped away so that really big robots and really scary monsters can duke it out.

    Unlike Michael Bay’s “Transformers” movies, “Pacific Rim” manages to make the super-sized action sequences feel appreciably colossal and yet still understandable. Because del Toro has such a sure hand with spectacle, each showdown has at least one or two genuinely arresting moments, with composer Ramin Djawadi providing a hard-edged score to heighten the intensity.

    Animation supervisor Hal Hickel and visual effects supervisors John Knoll and James E. Price have managed to craft a series of different Kaiju that are all ferocious, even if none of them are on screen long enough to really leave much of an impression.

    It’s a failing of “Pacific Rim,” both with its humans and its monsters, that nothing really resonates: They’re all anonymous pieces within del Toro’s grand design. Especially near the end, when humanity’s very last Jaeger pilots are mounting their do-or-die assault on this underwater interplanetary breach, “Pacific Rim” doesn’t stir the soul, but it does create a sense of awe thanks to the sheer audacity of del Toro’s vision.

    The movie is now being screened in Shenzhen.

    (SD-Agencies)