Evangelion 3.0 You Can (Not) Redo

After watching the 2.0 rebuild I was hyped to see the 3rd part. 3rd part of the rebuild series came off as a major disappointment and look no further than that.

The stroy was just atrocious, a 15 year time skip! And the number of flaws and inconsistencies. For like 27 min we don't get any exposition and even after we got some details alot of my questions were still answered. The pacing was really bad. The final battle was like half the movie. And we get these usless dialogues and scenes which don't even mean anything. And lastly for the plot it doesnt even make sense, after I watched 2.0 I thought it would go in any interesting direction but no it just hit a dead end. Oh my the characters what in the world did they do to the lineup. They skipped 15 years of character development and we don't get any background details deep enough for it to make much sense. The characters are shells of their former selves.

The constant mix of CGI with hand drawn animation was really annoying, there was too much CGI at times and the animation production dipped a bit compared to the prequel. The music composition and sound choices were similiar to the prequel.

Never watching this movie again...

Finally new material after years of remakes and recycled material and reshuffled scenes.

It is glorious to behold!

But, at the same time, it was a whole lot of setup and build up for the final part in the series. So, it didn't have as much bang as I would have liked.

Overall, it's very true to what came before, and it's nice to see these characters doing something new even if it was a bit of a tease to wait for the final movie.

The Rebuild saga blazes onward in Anno's world flipping master act. This is the world of Evangelion unlike anything that's been done before, boasting a new, clear and confident vision that brings our heroes and anti-heroes through endless strife and the most horrific of imaginable emotional confrontations. At times it's hard to watch for that reason, but the fact that an 'out' even exists, in all of its mysterious grandeur, shows us that this doesn't have to be the end… and it's already gone beyond THE End that we've previously been met with.

Atmosphere is what the entire movie is about. Dialogue is minimal, and much is left to the visuals to tell the story of the Fourth Impact. Those visuals are quite unlike much else I've seen in a film, carrying on Evangelion's hellish, dreamlike tradition of an original, complex, and thought-provoking art direction. The cryptic nature of every artistic level, be it writing, animation, design, or music cues, that the feature works on, recalls once again, the work of Stanley Kubrick and his 'Kubrick's Cube' of visual parallelism. Aside for some visual nods to Kubrick's work (2001: A Space Odyssey, in particular), Hideaki Anno produces a visual wonder through animation, as he has with the previous Evangelion entries (and the parallels between NGE and Rebuild, in their universe hand-offs, progressions, and quantum entanglements), and goes above and beyond. It's truly a masterpiece worthy of seemingly endless dissection.

One shot that stands out in particular for me is Shinji, listening to his Walkman in the foetal position in the ruins of NERV HQ as the green grass that has grown through the oppressive concrete floor over time rustles softly in the wind. It's melancholic and establishes the feeling of the film's middle act- its heart. Between that is the confusion of being in Shinji's shoes and facing a world fourteen years passes, for what is mere moments for him. It is effectively soul-crushing, driving one to desire a brighter future for all who still live on the Earth; but there's no way it will ever be reached without a battle hard-fought.

This is much the story of two particular characters, Shinji and Kaworu than the others and while at times that can feel disappointing, to recognize the importance of the plot's gaze is essential to understanding where the Rebuild is going. For every time I crave more of Mistato's development or an appearance from Kaji, the look back toward Shinji and Kaworu is ultimately as fulfilling. Visually, the movie presents so much to analyze and merely take in, that I feel we'll have enough to puzzle over right up until 4.0— Final. It's an absolute beauty, and to watch it in anything less than high definition is more than a disservice.

As if the startling premise wasn't enough of a radical change, the final 20 or so minutes takes Evangelion to unheard of heights and, in some cases, lows. These are the best kinds of each.

Though I can understand the dislike for this movie from fans of Evangelion, I urge them to look back upon it with eyes and a mind free of expectations and see it as something that isn't meant to be the Evangelion we know- the point of the movie is to venture into the unknown, not follow the path we've seen in Neon Genesis; from the end of 2.22, it would seem this was made clear.

It's new, it's mysterious, and quickly advancing toward a new ending that could be the end of all things, the breaking of the cycle that we've been experiencing for the past 18 years, across anime, manga, and feature film. But what is the element that Shinji must perform to finally defy every quantifiable expectation? Let's see what Mr. Anno has to present him.

"Everybody finds love in the end..."

This film loses all the momentum of the first two installments. It takes an interesting arc and just devolves into a bunch of empty moments. Before, there was intense drama and stakes serving a wider plot. Here it just feels forced. Everyone hates Shinji, sure, but it never seems convincing or meaningful.

With a plot full of holes like Swiss cheese, setting and setup that will confuse even the staunchest long-time fans, script on the level of a bad fan fiction, countless disrepancies and abandoned plot lines from the first two movies and characterization taking 180-degree turns every two seconds, Evangelion 3.0 is an utter mess at best, and an open insult to movie watchers at worst. It's a colossal failure as its own story, as a follow-up, as a remake and a movie in general that renders the previous two movies and all their accomplishments completely pointless.

Almost nothing from the previous films is resolved in any meaningful way: Shinji's relationships with his friends and slowly growing confidence, Kaji's shady dealings with NERV, the Key of Nebuchadnezzar, Rei coming out of her shell, Asuka warming up to people, the growing threat of Angel attacks and much more are completely abandoned and forgotten about. In their place we get an endless barrage of new terms and plot elements which the characters talk about, but none of which are ever adequately explained or established. The first 30 minutes consist of nothing but action scenes with only the tiniest amount of context or setup, just a bunch of flashy stuff for the viewer to look at.

The characters have taken a total nosedive. Mari, who had a strange foreboding about her in 2.0 is reduced to a mere sidekick with no meaning. Despite the 14-year gap, Asuka is still her old bratty self despite now being 28 years old. The justification for her and Mari not having aged is so ridiculous you have to wonder if the writers are actually pulling a prank. Misato is so far removed from her previous persona she might as well be an entirely new character. Rei's character actually regresses, as all her development from the previous movies is rendered nonexistent, and is never properly explained how. Gendo has become a caricature of himself. In the original series he had an enigmatic presence and there were hints of his deeper motives, but here there's nothing under the surface: he's just a cartoon villain, practically twirling his moustache and cackling "JUST AS PLANNED".

But the change of setting is undoubtedly the thing that shoots this film in the leg and then some. So many questions rise and are never answered that the viewer is completely lost. The last 20 minutes will be spent in utter confusion as the viewer tries to grasp even the flimsiest straw of what is supposed to be going on, and why it should mean anything. Bombastic music playing over certain scenes is the only signal of something meaningful happening, but since the setting is so unestablished the viewer is just left thinking "I guess that's important because the characters act like it is, but why should I care?"

Perhaps the only saving qualities of this film are the music and the animation, both of which are great and work to put together some rather impressive action scenes. But that makes it only so much worse when you think what other projects this clearly great amount of talent could have been used for, rather than this 90-minute fart in the audience's face. At one point Fuyutsuki, the one character who gives the only direct exposition in the film, says "'Tis a wretched role I'm playing" to himself. It's almost if he's meta talking about his character having been reduced to a useless exposition device.

Add to all this meaningless shoutouts to the original like recycled shots from the series and Gendo's new choice of eyewear, occasional pseudo-philosophical lines which don't mean anything and some completely out of place piano playing scenes that add nothing to the story and you have an indulgent, incomprehensible, poorly told, plot less, pretentious, forced mess that doesn't even have a proper ending. Stuff explodes, characters talk about things you don't understand, Shinji sulks, some piano playing, stuff explodes again and then the movie just stops. Nothing has been achieved, learned or accomplished and you just don't care.