Evangelion: 3.0 You Can (Not) Redo

Ah look, the black sheep of the rebuilds.

Look, this film was just ok when I watched it. It's dramatically improved by the sequel, which makes a lot of this film (notably not all) make actual sense. The goal of Anno it seems, is to show the plot from Shinji's perspective. So basically, confuse the hell out of the viewer to make us empathise with this kid. This is an interesting, but flawed decision I think. Why not trust the viewer to empathise with this traumatised, anxiety filled teenager that's forced to risk his life constantly? Is your target audience children?

Regardless, knowing what comes next does improve this aspect.

The film does start out strongly, with a fight on a scale not before seen in Evangelion. The 3D, while looking a bit cheaper, does allow for this to happen. I liked it quite a bit, and the general sense of overwhelming information at first is refreshing.

It's important to note that we are so far detached from the main series at this point, this is a fresh new experience with slightly different versions of characters that you probably love from the original series.

Don't let the feedback of this film scare you away. It's probably due to how confusing it is, and the 9 year wait people had to endure to actually get some answers.

For me, I just had to wait 5 minutes.

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.

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.

I feel like most of the hate for 3.0 comes from fans having to wait so long for the follow-up - this movie is very daring, taking this franchise in a very different direction and forming a more original take for these rebuild movies.

Unfortunately such a sudden change is tough to pull off in just 90 minutes, especially when most of the movie is confined to slower scenes focusing on the relationship between Shinji and Kaworu. Plus, the movie ends on what feels like a very abrupt 'conclusion', and it's painfully clear that this was intended to be released alongside 3.0+1.0.

The final nail in the coffin, however, isn't really related to this movie at all - it's the way that fans were forced to wait so long for the follow up - and it was only in the next movie that the many questions that bugged fans began to get given answers. 3.0 is not a great individual movie, and definitely works best when 3.0+1.0 is watched shortly afterwards.

However, this movie is still a great movie. The gorgeous visuals/soundtrack elevate the experience of watching 3.0 greatly, and it's slower pacing to focus on a movie confined character-focused story made for a unique change to this franchise. The animation is as good as ever (the cgi really isn't that bad guys), and this alternate (yet reminiscent) take on Shinji and Kaworu's relationship gives their characters far more depth.

It's not a perfect movie, but it's a damn good one and is certainly better with the added worldbuilding of 3.0+1.0.

9/10.