Monsters vs. Aliens 怪獸大戰外星人

What it doesn't have is heart. Or soul. Or much of a story.

Witherspoon voices a character named Susan Murphy, who on her wedding day is waylaid by a meteorite and turned into a giantess, in a sequence clearly inspired by the '50s B-movie classic "Attack of the 50 Foot Woman." From her erstwhile wedding bower she's whisked to an undisclosed location that houses a double-secret team of government-created monsters, whom she teams up with to battle the alien who sent the meteorite to Earth in the first place. That squidlike villain, voiced by Rainn Wilson, has four eyes, several slurpy-sounding tentacles and a yen for a substance called Quontonium, which. . . well, let's just say it's a substance uniquely designed to keep "Monsters vs. Aliens" plodding along, even after young viewers have lost interest in what passes for its narrative arc.

"Monsters vs. Aliens" begins with a certain amount of promise, from the space-scape of cosmic dust that looks like it's tumbling into spectators' laps to a clever bit of 3-D business featuring a paddle-ball game. (Indeed, the fun begins even before the lights go down, when little ones don their buglike oversize glasses to watch the film, making them look every bit as alien as the putative stars on screen.) But within minutes, the movie gets mired in long, talky stretches, many of them about Susan's relationship problems with her tiresome fiance Derek (Paul Rudd, utterly wasted here).

What's more, most of what passes for action takes place in a series of drab, airless bunkers and situation rooms, giving the movie a shockingly dreary and monotonous look. The most spectacular set piece of the film, a carnival of destruction set on San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge, goes on way too long, with far too little payoff (although Susan's chase through the city using a pair of convertibles as roller skates is a clever touch).

Like so many vehicles that have popped out from the DreamWorks Animation snark tank, "Monsters vs. Aliens" is too clever by half. The movie, which company chief Jeffrey Katzenberg has been flogging as the flagship of his "3-D: It's the Future!" campaign, does take technology to impressive new levels. With the exception of those early gags, and one or two menacingly outstretched arms, the film uses 3-D not for stunts but to create amazing visual depth and texture. Still, does anyone younger than 18 care about the subtleties of depth of field? (For that matter, does anyone over 18 care about it?) At a recent Saturday morning screening full of youngsters and their adult charges, nary a giggle or delighted gasp could be heard, maybe because references to "Creature From the Black Lagoon," "The Fly" and "Dr. Strangelove" are lost on the SpongeBob SquarePants set.

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