When audiences go to see director Guillermo del Toro’s robots vs. monsters epic “Pacific Rim” this week, human drama likely won’t be high on their list of reasons for attending.

The “Hellboy” director’s upcoming sci-fi film chronicles humanity’s desperate fight against an invasion of giant, city-wrecking aliens. In order to defend against this new threat, enormous piloted robots are constructed and deployed around the world.

Despite an awesome cast that includes the likes of Charlie Hunnam (“Sons of Anarchy”), Idris Elba (“The Wire”), Charlie Day (“Horrible Bosses”), and Ron Perlman (“Hellboy”), prospective viewers are hitting “Pacific Rim” for one reason and one reason only: To see the aforementioned skyscraper-sized bots and extraterrestrial leviathans beat the everliving crap out of one another.

“I wanted to keep it lean, and I wanted to keep it simple,” del Toro recently told Yahoo! Movies Canada.

Although “lean” and “simple” might not be words that one would readily associate with a $180 million mega-monster movie throwdown, the “Pan’s Labyrinth” director said the key was finding the right balance between the film’s grand scale robot action and its more grounded human elements.

“I wanted to sketch all the characters very precisely, but I didn’t want to overwhelm people,” del Toro admitted. “The fact is I have another hour of human drama in the can – I could have released a three-hour movie.”

All that extra footage may see the light of day on the “Pacific Rim” Blu-ray, but the 48-year-old Mexican filmmaker was quick to stress that the dramatic moments between his homo sapiens cast were just as important to the film as the battles between the computer-generated Jaegers and Kaiju (the name given to the film's human-built robots and alien beasts) and vice versa.

“The robots and the Kaiju are characters as well – so it’s the same story,” del Toro said. “If Gipsy Danger is fighting a kaiju, those are two characters that I should be invested in.”

However, Del Toro seems to understand why "Pacific Rim's" big bots and mountainous monsters might steal the show from their human counterparts. “Monsters are bigger than us – especially monsters of this scale,” the director said. “They are above morality, above nature – they are cosmic forces.”

"Pacific Rim" stomps into theatres on July 11.