Shin Evangelion Movie:||

Over 8 years of waiting for this, what a disappointment. Thrice Upon a Time feels more like a fanfic or parody than the "culmination" of Evangelion (that culmination came in 1997 with The End of Evangelion). I really thought it couldn't get any worse than the previous movie, but Thrice somehow managed it, no wonder it had a troubled production (production was a disjointed clusterfuck as seen in the documentary 'Hideaki Anno: The Final Challenge of Evangelion'). This was Anno's last opportunity to fix all the problems of the previous Rebuild films, especially after 3.0 left so many important questions unanswered. Why was the Near ... Third Impact so destructive? (at the end of 2.0 Kaworu stopped it just in time) How did Gendo and Fuyutsuki manage all NERV on their own when it seems that absolutely all the NERV staff betrayed them to form WILLE? What happened to Kaji? Why did SEELE disappear? What's the in-world explanation for the Eva's curse? Who is Mari? This movie either ignores or provides very unsatisfactory answers to these questions. Anno not only didn't fix any of the plot holes and inconsistencies, he made them worse, it's so bad it retroactively makes 3.0 even worse. Some may say "That's ok, Evangelion's focal point is its philosophical message and the characters' psyches, the post-apocalyptic narrative and robots are just dressing", that might be true but just because "the robots" end up taking a backseat to the introspection sequences doesn't mean bad writing should be given a pass (this movie fails at being a psychological exploration of its characters anyway).

Thrice runtime is 2 hours and 35 minutes long, it's the third longest animated movie ever made. Two and a half hours of bad exposition/info dumps, asspulls, contradictions, unconvincing character development, in-your-face/condescending meta-narrative and mindless CG action. The only good part of the movie is when they are in the village. This segment is the only part where the writing and character interactions felt natural (even though character development felt extremely rushed and unbelievable). It’s also visually impressive, the 2D animation, background art and cinematography really shines, unfortunately this doesn't last long and the rest of the movie mainly consists of bombastic action. It wouldn't be so bad if at least the action was good, but sadly long gone is the quality of action scenes like Asuka vs the Mass Production Evas from EoE; elegantly choreographed and accompanied with well thought out composition and camera movement, the amazing 2D animation of this scene looks just as good today as it did 24 years ago. Now we have ugly CG Evas (that already look outdated) with unnecessarily convoluted designs, stiff animation and a camera that cannot be still for a second (the constant camera spinning was absolutely nauseating). It's not just that they look bad, there's also no tension or anything at stake since Asuka and Mari can easily defeat thousands of Evas by simply shooting them with their guns (what good are their AT fields?).

The plot is very straightforward but full of unfamiliar terminology and lore exposition since the worldbuilding continues to be incredibly sparse compared to NGE. This has been a problem with the Rebuild films since 2.0 and it only got worse with each subsequent entry thanks to the timeskip. NGE had excellent lore and worldbuilding, it never gave you all the answers, but it gave you enough information to make sense of what was going on, while remaining consistent and believable whitin itself. Rebuild is a complete failure in this regard, and in Thrice everything feels more contrived, nonsensical and excessive than ever. Anyway, this movie gets so ridiculously meta none of this ends up mattering, so let's move on.

[ Beware of spoilers from now on. ]

What about the characters? They were always the strong suit of Evangelion. In NGE it took a realistically long time for Rei to behave like a human being in front of anyone that wasn't Gendo, in Thrice she's suddenly a cute baby full of curiosity, even though not long ago she was an emotionless doll, colder than ever during the events of the previous movie. Her character arc and relationship with Shinji are ruined with the awesome revelation that Rei was programmed to like Shinji à la Mikasa and is not choosing him over Gendo out of her own free will. I have to admit it was nice seeing Rei farming and hanging out with the old ladies, but this is the 2nd time we're seeing her humanization in these movies, it feels very redundant. Shinji starts out very depressed because of the death of Kaworu then Rei (after winning his affection) dies in front of him and instead of falling further into depression he suddenly becomes a stoic chad who is unfazed when someone points a gun at him. He transforms into an overly optimistic character, absolutely motivated to play the hero completely out of nowhere and of course everyone keeps telling him how much he has grown up, "Wow Shinji you have grown, you're a generic shonen protagonist now". Such is his mental fortitude and gravitas that he can talk Cyclops Gendo (a literal god and 4D chess master) into submission, not bad for someone that a few days ago suffered from severe depression and PTSD (he was borderline suicidal). Asuka continues to exist only for blatant fanservice (she spends most of her screen time half naked for no reason) and to tsunderely have a crush on Shinji, we hardly see anything from her past that makes us sympathize with her or a justification for her toxic behavior and instead we get a last minute asspull revelation: Asuka was a clone the whole time, because that's what Evangelion needed, more clones. Mari always felt like an unwanted guest on Evangelion, a Mary Sue whose dialogue consists almost entirely of one liners and only appears during combat/fanservice scenes, never having any meaningful interaction with any of the other characters. I've always hated Mari because RoE already had simplified versions of the original cast, with far fewer scenes to develop as characters than they had in NGE and she was stealing precious screen time from them. "No matter where you are, I'll come get you, Puppy Boy", yeah, yeah, shut up Anno's wife self-insert. This is the final movie and we do not see another facet of Mari or an interesting origin story relevant to the plot, no, she is still the same one-dimensional character singing and fooling around during critical moments, her existence in these movies is never justified. Worst of all, out of all the movies, this one gives her the most screen time while far better characters like Misato and Ritsuko were put aside. Yes, Misato is once again relegated to a very minor role, most of her dialogue is just poor exposition about what happened to Kaji (Gendo and Ritsuko were also reduced to exposition spouting robots).

This time around the Human Instrumentality is much more direct thanks to Gendo constantly explaining everything with unnecessary info dumps, "This is the world of your memories. Our senses can't perceive the anti-universe. Therefore the LCL has created a virtual environment we can perceive", it's all dumbed down so even the dumbest normie can understand. It's as if during the sandbox sequence from EoE there was some know-it-all character explaining the meaning behind all the symbolism and metaphors, ruining the atmosphere and leaving no place for interpretation. The Human Instrumentality should offer viewers more space for imagination and self-reflection. Fourth Impact, Another Impact, Additional Impact or whatever the fuck it's called, basically consists of bad CG, superficial visual callbacks to EoE, Gendo's backstory/introspection (admittedly this part wasn't so bad) and happy send-offs to all the main characters that felt rushed and unearned. Yeah, Shinji is such a Gary Stu now he doesn't even need psychotherapy through Instrumentality anymore, instead he is the fucking psychotherapist fixing everyone's problems. Our protagonist was reduced to a plot device.

3.0+1.0 also went way too far with its 4th wall breaking elements. Once again EoE did it so much better, it just works better when it's done subtlety (e.g., the death threats/fan mail flashed on screen at the end of the live action sequence). Shinji saying "Neon Genesis", bad CG on purpose (Unit-01 vs Unit-13 fight in Tokyo-3) and uncanny valley giant Rei were just too much, instead of leaving me in awe or perplexed I was laughing and unimmersed.

Even the message of the movie feels wrong. The message of NGE was: "You are worthy of love, especially from yourself. Social interaction can be painful but you need to connect with other people in order to be happy, don't be afraid/don't run away". The message of this movie is: "Say bye-bye to Evangelion, it's time to grow up. Stop being a loser (otaku), go outside and touch grass. Get some pussy like I (Hideaki Anno) did". It's very meta but also very condescending, hypocritical and redundant. This meta-message felt so much more sincere and empathetic the way it was delivered during the live action sequence in EoE ("You were avoiding the truth by escaping into a fictional world"), mainly because there wasn't a "gorgeous gal with big boobs" representation of Anno's wife lusting over Shinji/Anno, and because 'The END of Evangelion' was supposed to be the end of Evangelion, but no, Anno had to make 4 more multi-million dollar movies in the span of 14 years just to tell us once again to move on from Evangelion, not content with that he's also judging us as immature while simultaneously putting more butt shots in this movie than the entirety of the previous Rebuild movies and NGE combined. Meta-narrative aside Shinji literally ran away from HIS real world and all its problems, this is escapism at its worst. In both EoE and NGE Shinji rejects Instrumentality and decides to return to the real world even though that means being hurt, basically he decides to stop running away from reality and start facing it, this movie is the complete opposite. The realistically optimistic EoE: "Anywhere can be paradise as long as you have the will to live". The overly optimistic and delusional 3.0+1.0: "Erase your reality and get yourself isekai'd to a different reality". World resets are such cop-out endings, they don't belong in Evangelion, they are incompatible with its anti-escapism message. And of course Shinji ends up with Mari, even though story-wise it doesn't make sense since they hardly ever interacted with each other (plus Mari is really a 50-something year old woman making moves on a minor, that's fucked up), but that's just how it had to be because Shinji is Anno's self-insert and Mari is Anno's wife self-insert in this condescending allegory of growing up.

In the 90s Anno was struggling with depression and Evangelion was a way of therapy for him. So Eva has always been a deeply personal reflection of its creator, but its themes were universal and relatable, knowledge of Anno's personal life was never necessary to understand and appreciate NGE. Unfortunately that's not the case anymore. Shinji is suddenly a completely different person, he's full of confidence and optimism, why? Because Anno is a different person now, he's no longer in a dark state of mind. The only justification for Mari being a complete non-character is that she's a representation of Anno's wife, coming into his life to make it better. You need to know a lot about Anno's personal life to justify Shinji acting so out of character, him and Mari ending up as a couple, Mari's role, and the forced overly optimistic/happy ending (Shinji getting his choker removed is obviously a metaphor for Anno breaking free from the burden of Evangelion, specifically the burden of "Rebuilding" Eva, a burden he took upon himself when he didn't have to). Having an underlying meaning behind all the in-world nonsense doesn't make a story good, good writing does. There's only one thing worse than knowing Anno ruined RoE's narrative and characters for the sake of an extremely personal and overindulgent meta-narrative, and that's being completely in the dark about all of this, which is the case for many new fans and casual viewers, and let's not forget RoE main target was to attract those people.

On a side note this movie has one of the worst cases of unwanted fanservice during a serious moment I've ever seen, yeah I'm talking about the butt shots of Toji's sister during that dramatic scene. Evangelion has always had lots of fanservice, but unlike this movie it was always used at the right times.

TLDR: Thrice Upon a Time does not give a satisfactory answer to the many unaswered questions left by its predecessor, Anno no longer treats his audience with respect and now feels the need to explain everything with bad exposition, character development is unconvincing or lacking because most of the runtime is wasted on awful CG action scenes (those first 10 minutes in Paris were so incredibly unecessary), the meta-narrative/4th wall breaking elements felt too intrusive and the message is condescending, hypocritical and redundant.

No one ever believed that the Rebuild films could possibly leave a legacy comparable to that of NGE and EoE, but I think I speak for many Eva fans when I say that we didn't think Anno would disappoint us so badly either. In its advertising this film has been announced as "The end of Evangelion" ("Bye-bye, all of Evangelion"), but for me this is only the end of Rebuild of Evangelion. I don't care about endless cycles, time loops and multiverses, for me the real end of Evangelion happened in 1997 and that's the way it should have stayed.

World-building (and World-Destroying) of Evangelion - 1.01+2.22+3.333+(3.0+1.01): This is the Suspension, Beyond Belief

Warning: Spoilers

Compared to 3.0, which was notoriously reticent to explain the whys and hows of its newfangled setting, Thrice is dedicated to filling in old underlines. But the delay has colored the viewing experience a shade, making it hard not to feel palpable elation or dread as minute one begins, having over the years remained in suspense to find out what it was we watched a decade ago--no one could say if 3.0 (and Rebuild as a whole) checked out or not, even if they felt more or less sure about their ... gut instinct. Whether intended or not, part of what watching Thrice means is that 3.0 looms large in mind, almost like a picture-in-picture, new pieces of information grafted back to try and make sense of an entire other film--not a problem in itself, and something that could have potentially been novel if not for the fact that Thrice's infodumps are both rapid-fire and, after all this suspension of what could have been belief, pretty much nonsense. Many have already defended Thrice's rapid pacing in the same way they defended 3.0's inscrutability, as a means to place the audience in Shinji's shoes empathetically; the point is to feel overstimulated. But that excuse doesn't stand to reason for long because while Shinji took a proactive role in 3.0, he's apathetic from minute one of Thrice, though we as an audience are eager to piece things together, and so Shinji's role becomes a tagalong slumped in the corner. Although she's no proxy for the audience, Rei begins to function nearly as well, fresh eyed and reacting to what details the script throws her way, but though the village from her perspective is calm and patient, everything goes as rapid as anything else, including herself when she unceremoniously melts.

Perhaps the calculation was "if we don't dwell on it, the faults won't be detected," or a simple case of script length conflicting with budget and runtime limitations. Nonethless, Thrice begins at a sprint. Back when, distilling NGE's plot into a tetralogy was already chaffing at the runtime, far before there were 14 years of brand new mostly unreferenced chronology. Despite the breakneck pacing, 1.0 & 2.0 were at least heavily grounded in their real-world setting in terms of character; everyone was motivated (or not) by their sense of purpose within rigid bureaucratic structures, there was a sense of realism to the fact they had authorities under which they bristled, and this created instant relatability to their duties, even bridge bunnies or schoolchildren. Montage scenes were spent inside giant silos, metropolitan Neo-Tokyo, environmental restoration projects and a civilian life plagued by the effects of a recent crisis. Come the time-skip the afforementioned was totally laid to waste, and but to replace it nothing that did remain was dwelled on and what retroactive explanation we would ever get, turns out, would occur in 2-3 second glimpses a film later. Ignoring how effective lack of information was (or wasn't) to bring us into Shinji's confused perspective at the time of 3.0, in effect it meant no one was motivated by anything but unrevealed pasts, secret plans and what might have been (who could be certain?) make it up as you go sci-fi magick.

The post-timeskip setting, no longer able to run from light of day, can best be described as scorched-earth in the not strictly apocalyptic sense. The absence of a near-conspicuous pretty much everything, as wrought by the most recent of who can keep track of how many by now Impacts, feels less like an effective premise and more like the hand of the writer reaching down through a black hole, crumpling up every country, and thus any nitty-gritty, perhaps challenging real-world constraint, for the sake of not having to bother. The suspiciously threadbare quality of the post-timeskip setting also turns out to have applied, no surprise, to the characters who inhabited it and the events that occurred therein, as ridiculous as this all along: every world government has collapsed into Gendo on one end and Misato on the other, the nearest comparison to the dramatic effect of which are saturday morning cartoons where no one matters but He-Man and Skeletor et al. Sure the bad guy is always around the corner, about to close in with sinister iron-clad machinations, and maybe the heroes show momentary doubt and a setback or two as they flip a thousand times and run up the side of a building, but the jeopardy and stakes are as much a gesture as the commercial breaks, and we all know how it proceeds.

Everything works and looks as it does just 'cause--sure there's catastrophic near-annihilation of the race, but this isn't really getting anyone down, or at least not enough to prevent them from jiggling their busts and throwing out their hips in super-stylish, immaculately designed sci-fi gear. A lampshade is hung in the pre-credit sequence when the pink bridge bunny gripes about skintight suits, the conceit being that all appearances aside, they must merely need to be skintight 'because science,' neglecting that the designs are half greebles and racing stripes, clearly useless and clearly highlights to emphasize bust, pelvis, etc. in new and unexplored ways. Not even the previously unglamorous and strictly unspecial tertiaries register as mere humans anymore; nerdy male bridge bunnies get plugsuits, and even Gendo has a sleek, sexy redesign. Misato is brooding and tragic while cosplaying in some patchwork recreation of famous anime ship captains, made possible by whoever might be Wille's fashion designer, impossible to imagine as an actual character and not merely the real-life otaku who neglect to pen them. Plugsuits and battle regalia are one thing, but the idea that Gendo spends his time in his drafty, devoid silo ruffling up his hair with bedhead mousse every morning in his bathrom mirror is another. Who cares about looking like they're on the cover of Newtype when the world is all but destroyed? But increasingly outrageous aesthetics and commerce has long since overtaken Eva's enduring qualities as a story, the omnipresence of which Eva Doritos and the Radio Eva fashion line attests to and at a more consistent rate than Eva's presence as a theatrical event. In-universe in Rebuild our hero characters wage war against the devastation of world catastrophe, but in our very own real world the very process through which world destruction occurs is through mechanical warehouses squirting molten PVC into molds of these stylish folks en masse. One imagines a sun-blistered hunter-gatherer 1,000 years from now picking at the ash heap of debris that's become of once first-world nations, finding a smudged figurine of Asuka or Rei (who can tell, the head is missing and the colors faded), what once was a mere lewd 14-year old a new century Venus of Hohle Fels, and deeming it no practical use and throwing it over their shoulder or sticking it into a potato sack to jack off to later.

At least Thrice's opening village brings us back to a lived-in setting; brutalized to the point of what would be considerably reasonable insanity, everyone has become confident, worldly and stern, the village life ideal. Not to be a pessimist and say outright that such an attitude and community is impossible given the setting, it's just that the population number plummeting so low is less significant as a horrible fact and more suspicious as a drafting convenience: just the right size for nothing negative to be organically developing, and thus explored, just the right scope for a purely rhetorical tool, little more than a prop, none other than a snowglobe (what with the spotlight of green against all that crimson), full of hyperbolic grace and generosity, merely to contrast with the toy ship that is Wunder, and its fleet of irrational misunderstanding assholes. Immediately compassionate to Shinji, super welcoming to Rei as an outsider, fresh off the product line of the nemesis though she is, and compared to the typical Eva pessimism, almost like a Hallmark fantasy. But in reality, once the population grows past a certain point, reaches a certain saturation, very real problems are going to rear their head, and not because of limits forced upon them from outside the dome--they'll eventually modernize, industrialize, and pollute--in fact, they could conceivably have all the modern problems of real-world Japan. What then?

Jump ahead a few action scenes to the climax, and when the inevitable Instrumentality occurs, it's treated less as an actualization you might not be ready for and a defiling wisdom you might never recover from, and more like a mcguffin, wielded by Gendo to get what he wants, handed off to Shinji to get what he wants. It's almost like the trajectory the setting takes is from one that's plausible enough to one outright implausible, and then even further into a completely solipsistic platonic realm, but without the maturity or self-scrutiny of a Charlie Kaufman script or any earlier example of the same conceit. Each half of the movie is left suffering from its own different blindness--the village is ideal, there's nothing negative--and Shinji exiles it anyway and transmutes it into modern live-action Japan, but nothing of modern Japan's qualities, positive or negative, are alluded to. We're left divorced from the prior setting but withheld from the new one. The film constantly shifts around what could conceivably resemble anything real and serious, neglecting opportunities at every turn, and instead uses the existence of Evangelion Units themselves as a bizarre scapegoat--all you need do to fix the universe is pull yourself up by the quantum bootstraps, attain total cosmic control, wish away industrial eldritch abominations, and talk everyone out of their secret foibles. The apotheosis of our godhead-dipped Shinji ends up being mundane, the kind of talismanic willful optimism you can find just as easily in the grocery store bestsellers rack, on Oprah, or through a vision board. All questions one might still have--about the setting, about what particular characters may or may not themselves understand--are summarily discarded as obstacles should they risk getting in the way of the predetermined wholesome end. Although much has been made of the "long desired" finality of Thrice, the presence of conventional resolutions only bleeds out and undoes what was once distinct from the narrative; it was interesting in episode 26 and End of Evangelion that there wasn't a final battle, nor a heart to heart between father and son obligated by the trite notion that it must occur no matter what, no matter how genocidal the father, no matter if the absence, omission or subversion could have been more interesting, realistic, effective, novel, etcetera.

The world-building is discarded by Anno through Shinji, but never in the realm of endless internet analysis does something escape the fate of swirling forever in posterity, and the byproduct of Thrice's loredump excretions is, well, exactly that. Before I get a stick and begin poking into it, full-disclosure: lore was not the grand point of Eva for me. It's always been its sense of emotion and its formal experimentation with its medium, the design philosophy and visual storytelling, the (previously) delicate handle on character and setting. But the thing is, with Eva of old, if you did want to focus on the lore, it was rewarding enough to track and felt like it added to the atmosphere if anything. When I did a rewatch recently, me and my viewing partner (who also took an interest to the lore purely as an added extra) felt like in our teasing-out of the big picture that while we ran into places where information or clarity was withheld, there never felt like huge gaps in logic, not in terms of something not working with some effort on our part, and not in things seeming like they were being discarded without justification. It was easy to form a perspective on the lore in a way that dovetailed neatly into the experimental sequences and overall meaning. Seele is there from the start, and although they clearly turn into something different than their initial appearance, they do so with consistent rate & rhythm. The spear is introduced slowly, the way Angels, Evas, Lilith et al function is introduced at a good clip, Human Instrumentality is there since the opening credits, Rei's origins, the origin of Nerv, etc. all have their time. When everything goes down into surreal territory, the sequence of events leading to it track as real events that unfold, even if certain elements are inscrutable or the physics of the spears verges on the ridiculous. The overall nebulous armageddon of it all contributes to the feeling of a difficult and alienating world, even if you can't get a grasp of, say, the Doors of Guf. Nonetheless, the idea of Human Instrumentality checks out as a hard sci-fi premise and Shinji's purely psychological journey that it affords also feels like a solid tracing of something from Point A to Point B. The series and what it presents itself as morphs over time, but it's a morph you can swallow and track.

Now we have Rebuild, where even before the phantasmagoria begins, the physics of the spears out of nowhere apparently function under the whims of human emotion, Misato's ship is capable of transformation in the same 'just because' fashion of Unit-02 morphing into a cat, there's a third, new spear out of nowhere, not to mention a "Book of Life" that somehow explains and doesn't explain Kaworu's loop, which I struggle to understand the workings of (if I don't chalk it up to purely figurative metacontext operating as literal plot device). NGE seemed like you could squint and make sense of the calculus, so long as you didn't get too close to what were maybe some rough rafter beams. But in Rebuild there seem not to even be connecting joints. Case in point, Seele once had the benefit of being an obscure, mystic organization with religious eschatology beliefs and fealty to the arcane, so as to drench the hooey in thick enough shadows. But now all of that has been shouldered onto Gendo the all-powerful (and thus dramatically impotent) plan-wizard. Nothing in NGE compares to the absurdity that he's contrived Rei and Kaworu's interactions with Shinji as a means to lead the plot to its goal, confident that their interactions will give the plan either exactly what it needs or in the worst case can easily be incorporated into anyway. Even Seele talked about compromises, backups and powerlessness on their part. But how is it Wille scrounges for scraps but Neo Nerv can spit out newly-minted tech in perpetuity? At the end of the day, these are just random elements that don't dovetail or fit in with everything else, or at the least have any sense of buildup to their inclusion. NGE set limitations and discarded them, but not to this haphazard extent. Whereas Eva Units once had to operate under the restricting principle that they need connection to a power source, now we can say, thanks to the unending convenience of the timeskip, 'well, they formulated a way to get around that business.' Much like the Nemesis Series, Opfer Types, and Mk. Units, the supposition crazy new forms of tech occurred in the intervening years is just an unrestrained excuse to indulge in new designs and action sequence pyrotechnics.

Although a tremendous effort is undertaken to hide the shallow waters at the drama's core with run-on technobabble gobbledegook, the whole of the Rebuilds is basically a long-winded calculus--old elements and rules from the old show are put into new forms, a new "anti-universe" is appended, things melt and transport and woosh by the camera. What suffers most is a sense of character--something, as a result, my review has mostly avoided as well. Things jump ahead, get obliterated, rewritten and propped up for money shots too fast for the characters along for the ride to sufficiently exist, their desires and actions strangled and dragged by plot requirement or snubbed in favor of another color-bomb acrobatic mech romp interrupted here and there by jargon. 1.0 & 2.0 had a lot of shorthand, scenes working as stand-ins for several at once, characters getting folded into each other, etc., yet it was easy not to get lost in the breathless condensation because you had interior reference to the original as you watched and parsed, and perhaps part of the calculation from a scriptwriting sense was to rely on old knowledge as a safety net when glossing over the plot. 3.0 & Thrice feel much the same, but with the huge exception that whatever longer-form material there is to fall back on doesn't actually exist. As a result, each story beat is so preoccupied with justifying itself retroactively, backtracking and playing keep-up, that we never get a foothold until the events which erase the scenario unfold. As one example of egregious narrative expedition, Misato makes a heelturn of taking responsibility within the same scene we're given a 30-second insight into what she's heelturning from anyway. Each moment is too top-loaded, and because so little time is spent living inside the scenario as a time and place, I almost feel in many ways the post-timeskip script often forgets the timeskip even occurred, as strange as that sounds, simply because the characters aren't believable as people who ever lived outside of exposition. There's no moment where they just are, no sense of the gravity to the setting as they've seen it or what it's like to strive from inside of it. When characters do talk, they often say things to each other they should both already know, because they're not really talking to eachother, but the camera.

A setting works or it doesn't, and I'm not sure I can say with confidence that post-timeskip Rebuild even counts as one. It's more like a painted backdrop for the characters to exist in front of in forms detached from anything remotely resembling life or how real people are, and then they're swallowed up in another complete setting change when metafiction (read: Instrumentality) overrides the time-skip and everyone just becomes a symbol or self-reflexive comment on themselves. The problem is that this metafiction is very restricted and reticent to actually stare itself in the face; why not go all the way and have Rebuild question its existence as a commercial property? The answer is likely that the money is greatly enjoyed, and the largest share of audience-goers want the kind of smile from Shinji that disposes of any notion of lasting or forthcoming discomfort. Those who treat Evangelion on par with Schopenhauer would do well to remember that Eva has since become a sizable portion of Japan's overall economy and Anno a real estate speculator. As the saying goes, "systems don't teach you the means to topple them."

------SPOILERS FOR EVA 3+9+10+11+12-42+1.01 AHEAD------

I have consumed at least some of nearly every non-game Evangelion property, and I can confidently say that this is the singular worst property. Yes, worse than Rebuild 3.0. Yes, worse that ANIMA. YES worse than Campus Apocalypse. The sheer audacity of this movie; to spit in the face of the audience, insult their intelligence, ignore the lore & continuity of the previous movies and series, and produce a mediocre product created for absolutely no worthwhile reason.

Let's go in order here.

First up, Story: I give this a 1.
The first ~50 minutes of this movie are really quite well done. Art is ... solid, plot is relatively consistent with the previous movies, and its a well done work which shows the character growth of Rei Q, Toji, Kensuke, and Shinji. Then the plot goes downhill from there, moment to moment, until it reaches utter rock-bottom by the end of the film. The film ignores basic plot-points from previous films, introduces plot contrivances and mcguffins to carry the protagonists to the end of the film, and refuses to explain absolutely anything—until the last 45 minutes where every single line of dialogue is exposition to explain just HOW THE FUCK what we see going on is possibly occurring.

To touch on a few specific scenes: somehow NERV can just initiate Another/Final/Fourth/Additional Impact whenever they want, as well as having literal millions of Eva 4-somethings to send around the world, and yet they somehow haven't won? Meanwhile WILLE is throwing around random-ass technology to fix the world, Asuka is a clone now, and Mari is immortal. A series of nonsensical plot choices drive this story into directions that the story had no right going, and which serves no purpose as a fulfilling story.

Next up, Art: 5
The art and imagery in this film ranges from excellent (from ~15 minutes to 50 minutes--i.e. the village scenes), to absolute shit (i.e. most of the rest of the film). Standout terrible moments include Mari & Asuka falling toward Unit-13, a scene with absolutely no sense of tension, scale, nor time-scale; the giant Rei head (people say it was supposed to evoke the same sense of 'aaaahhhh' that the OG in EoE did. I just laughed my ass off); the whole 4I scene where Gendo has his breakdown is an unnecessary callback to EoE with its hand-drawn panels, and the film would be better without those nostalgia trips.

In fact, so much of this film hinges on nostalgia and callbacks to NGE and EoE, nearly every scene has some uncalled-for reference. Some of them are done well, while others are just there for the eponymous fanservice the series has always claimed to have. It's pointless, but the drawings still look fine. CGI has somehow gotten shittier over the series despite the 14 years that passed between 1.0 and 3.0+1.0.

Sound: 4
Evangelion Rebuild 1 and 2 had excellent soundtracks, both in the orchestrated battle music from Sagisu, as well as other offerings such as Beautiful World, the best ending song the Eva series has ever had. Eva 3 continued this trend to an extent, while Eva 4 completely drops, dropkicks it to space, and then stabs it with the Spears of Despair, Hope, and WILLE.

There were no standout song throughout the entire film except the various Decisive Battle remixes, the ending song One Last Kiss, and the reused Beautiful World (da capo).

Character: 1
There is not a single character in our main cast whomst I think was well done. Outside of our main cast, the list only includes Toji and the village old ladies. Throughout the rest of the cast, so many of them did complete 180s from their characters in 3.0, some with no explanation, others via a heelturn brought about by another character who said "lol actually ur wrong" to which they just immediately agreed. The amount of backpedaling for actions in 3.0 makes this movie seem more like Rise of Skywalker with how much retconning is going around. Let's briefly go through each major character.

Asuka: Suddenly she's a clone! How much buildup was there to this reveal? Absolutely fucking none! Also she wants headpats I suppose. Her character is mostly unchanged from 3.0, and is still shit. One interesting facet of her character is that her comfort-blanket comes in the form of Kensuke Aida now... a character whom she's never shown any interest in, and actively disliked in the original series. (I can't remember if they ever interacted in Rebuild 2). AND ALSO SHE'S AN ANGEL NOW (kinda foreshadowed, and actually pretty interesting twist here).

Mari: Actual-factual cradle robber right here. She's around the age of 60, while Shinji is still 15. Bruh wtf. There are a lot of reveals about Mary Iscariot in this film, and very few-to-none of them are explained or even foreshadowed. No idea why she's so into Shinji though.

Kaworu: he shows up again, despite being, y'know, dead. Apparently the time-loop theory is correct, and Kaworu and Shinji are destined to meet forever and ever unless Kaworu suffocates or smth. Also apparently he has some connection with Kaji told in the form of flashback? Completely unexplained.

Misato: backpedaling on her 3.0 characterization, now Misato actually really thinks Shinji is a great kid and didn't do anything wrong.

Ritsuko: see above.

Sakura: see above but reversed LMAO. She straight-up tried to shoot Shinji to keep him from getting in the robot... when the world was literally ending and Shinji was their only hope to stop it.

Gendo: this man was so antisocial as a child that the moment anyone showed romantic interest in him the phrase "I'd end the world to see your smile" wasn't so much of an exaggeration anymore. Also he became God somehow? I literally could not follow the last 30 minutes of this movie despite watching it twice. Him being able to fly, shoot lasers, and transform into Cyclops from X-Men was cool, even if completely moronic.

Shinji: This man gets better not by the power of friendship, but through a 3 step program. Step 1: get force-fed by an immortal German angel. Step 2: sulk. Step 3: have a clone of a clone of a clone tell you she likes you, then watch her explode. Profit. Shinji makes a complete heel-turn to a confident-shonen protagonist, that both doesn't feel genuine, nor like an Evangelion character. Manga Shinji or ANIMA Shinji—both of whom ARE basically shonen protagonists—feel much better realized than Shinji in 4.0. His dialogue at the end of the film about how he "thinks he can handle pain and heartbreak" just sounds terrible considering his character arc in the Rebuild films, let alone how poorly it was handled in this one.

Enjoyment: 1
It was a shitty movie. I watched it twice in the span of two days, and it only got worse on the second viewing. Series of plot-contrivances combined with crappy music and art and culminating with a cherry on top of inaccurate characters led to an unenjoyable film experience.

To recap:
Story: 1
Art: 5
Sound: 4
Character: 1
Enjoyment: 1
Overall, 12/50 or 2.4/10

Edit: It has come to my attention that Mari might also be a clone, due to the similar suffix of 'Nami' in her name. I think that that's stupid, and if it is the case, it simply adds more fire to the problem of "too many clones".

Could content made by the original creator still be classified as fan fiction? Well, technically no, but leave it to Hideaki Anno to make the impossible, possible.

The Evangelion Rebuild films aren't so much about telling their own story or introducing new audiences to the world of Anno's Evangelion as it is about Evangelion itself. Not Evangelion the original series and film mind you, but what it's come to represent in the collective minds of all those who've ran away with romantic notions of its placement as a bedrock of their youth. If there's anything "existential" here it's in a generation's obsession with iconography, the hive-minded ... fan-culture that surrounds it, and ultimately, the commodification of these attributes by celebrating the steadfast loyalty of continuous consumer support, well into adulthood, because after all, Evangelion helped you cope as a teen, right? Well, at the very least, that's how I choose to view these gussied-up Rebuild celebrations because if viewed as actual films, they're a mess.

Gobbledygook that borders on self-parody—congratulatory about using metacontextual frameworks to aid in its commentary as if the Japanese New Wave of the 60s didn't already came and went. The Evangelion rebuild films are at best, well-intentioned nonsense, and at worst, try-hard nonsense. The kind of neurotic patch-job of "this would look cool" storyboarding decision-making blended with a cocktail of Terrence Malick-isms via insular logic. It's its own religious institution, built inside the pop culture echo chamber that houses it—don't expect common sense to make any appearances here.

Philosophical word vomit, fashion accessory human trauma, comically nebulous dialogue, and superfluous worldbuilding are all the name of the game when discussing these films. What's important is that you "feel" it or whatever that means. But honestly, it's about audience participation, your willingness to ignore all prior convictions for perceived issues you've lobbied at other creator's art before, and instead, choose to see the sincerity in what's essentially "Gurren Lagann but pretend it actually makes sense logistically" all without a hint of self-awareness, irony, or acceptance of the fact that this works because it's inherently childish. Kids playing with their toys: Smash! Grrrr! Pow!, robot go BOOM! PEW PEW!

These installments, and Thrice Upon a Time especially, are about these dreamt-up escapist scenarios. Expanding the lore of Angels, Seele, vague prophecies, Eva units, and other tidbits that at one point were just tertiary mechanics in exploring the characters themselves. For as high as the stakes and situation were for the original Evangelion tv-series and subsequent film, it was never actually about those things. The spectacle was grand, but ultimately, the intent was intimate. It was about dealing with depression, imposter syndrome, parental (ir)responsibility, the inherent ugliness, and beauty that came hand-in-hand with growing up. Navigating the uncertainty of adulthood. It's about everything else that the cool-looking mecha series came to inhabit. Evangelion was the title, but ultimately, not the point.

The same can't be said about these rebuild films. Exploitatively mining these aspects, yes, but now it's about pre-established value, no different than what the Star Wars property has become over time. In a way, that's commendable, that an anime property outside the behemoths of Gundam or whatever long-running shounen is airing at any given time, that what was at once a cult-classic, has now grown to a size capable of supporting such an excursion by its head architect. An adoration not even George Lucas was able to maintain.

But if you're not a subscriber that deifies this creative and everything they attach their name to, it becomes harder to justify any of it. This is a film that makes broad emotional story beats, patting itself on the back for taking what iota of characterization exists in its current state and proceeding to overanalyze it, making supposedly "profound" discoveries, despite having to rely entirely on the audience to at least have a cursory knowledge of the original material to make any of these epiphanies stick because otherwise, they don't. If viewed independently, they're all facsimiles of the content they came from. Personalities robbed of nuance, where it expects the audience to fill in the gaps with what they've gathered prior to viewing it, as well as whatever projection already grafted onto the material from years of germinated love for their status symbols. Whatever brief moments of cleverness or insight that these Rebuild films end up landing on are continuously thwarted by excessive, unchecked indulgence.

In a way, this film is reflective of that infamous scene in The End of Evangelion, where we, the audience, get the privilege of being the bedridden Asuka, while the film itself is Shinji, hovering over us with its seed in its palm. You'll either relish the opportunity to be the object of your cult leader's affection or just find the whole thing incredibly awkward.

These films aren't necessarily for fans but more so for diehard fanatics. And you know what? That's fine.

What a colorful, sincere shit show.

I know this is not the best score to give to such a praised piece of art, but here I am, telling you all just how I feel, and how the Rebuilds achieved Hideaki Anno's dream of turning Evangelion into just another generic mecha series.


We need to begin from Neon Genesis Evangelion.
An absolute masterpiece. Its animation style might be old, but it achieves to show SO MUCH in a spectacular way. It deals with profound topics and themes, like loneliness, depression and trauma in a fascinating world with the main idea of anti-escapism.
And Hideaki called it a generic Mecha show.
It's an exploration of the mind, ... a cry for help, and a showcase of humanity. We all know that and it is why it has survived to this day.

So then Hideaki makes The End of Evangelion, as revenge, trying to sabotage the ending, adding confusing and uncomfortable scenes... And it all just sent Eva into stardom. It is a fantastic ending that fits perfectly ALONGSIDE NGE's, resulting into a piece of art that can work as a source of hope for everyone who watches it.


The rebuilds are his second attempt, and sadly, he has achieved it.
The characters changed so much, what made them good in the first place is ruined by the time 3.33 ends. They are generic and stereotipical, with close to no development. ESPECIALLY Mari.
Evangelion LOSES its essence in the rebuilds, and truly becomes a generic mecha show, that is weird JUST BECAUSE it's called Evangelion.

Now, sure, the industry benefited from the Rebuilds. The redesigns of the angels truly make them seem Cosmical, and the battles turn out spectacularly. I would also be lying if I said I could live without Shirou Sagisu's soundtrack.
But its story ruins it.

SPOILERS FOR 3.0+1.0


I absolutely hate what this movie proposes.
It makes absolutely no sense, it turns out as completely unnecessary, and it ruins the original message of the first one.

I DESPISE the Idea of it all being a cycle.
It turns out as something absolutely DEPRESSING, because if you're someone who comes from NGE and The End, you know Shinji has moved on and accepted the fact that there will be pain. You know that The End is actually a happy one. But now, they tell us it is a cycle. Now NONE of that progress, None of that suffering matters. They will ALL forget it. And repeat, and repeat, and repeat.
A fate worse than death.

Neon Genesis Evangelion is NOT that.
The Rebuilds make me wish they were not canon.
Just watch NGE again instead.
It's much more worthwhile.

Hideaki Anno has completely ruined Neon Genesis Evangelion by utterly disregarding the fans hopes and expectations. It was such a long journey from the first movie in 2007 to this final movie in 2021 just to metaphorically slap all the fans in the face by this disaster of a film. The worst thing about this movie is the message they're sending out to every single fan of anime and that is "to grow up and move on with our lives." and specifically, moving on from anime and becoming a productive member of society. I vehemently despise that message. You never have to grow up if ... you don't want to. You can remain a child at heart forever and anyone who tells you otherwise is a hypocrite and a liar. There is a reason why people go on vacations or quit their jobs (or change jobs) and that reason is because nobody wants to work all the time. We all want to be happy and enjoy life without having to work our entire life away. Anyways, to conclude, I vehemently despise this movie (and it's message) and will not be watching anything else from Hideaki Anno. He has completely and utterly failed the fans and I am no longer a fan of Evangelion.

This is currently rated higher than the original end of evangellion. If you ever wanted more proof the average MAL user has brain worms.

The rebuilds were built out of pure hatred Anno has for his audience. Imagine making an anime that is explicitly about how shit anime is. Every character in Eva is a direct refutation of all the shit tropes. Asuke is the red haired Tsundere. But in Eva it asks the question of how a person could become so unable to genuinley express themselves, it shows the pain and horror of being unable to show affection. Rei is the Kuudere and in ... the end she is just one of a trillion clones showing how shit the trope is. The point is Anno is showing the audience the horrible trappings of anime and aims to go beyond them, deconstruct them. And it was amazing. And then it ended in the greatest movie ever seen.

So then years past and noe Asuka and Rei are waifu icons with their faces plastered on fanta cans and pillows for weebs. All the depth is gone. His creation given to his fans and they wiped their asses with it. Seriously here is what he did.

First movie nothing changes, its literally just eva. An almost 1:1 remake. Yay fans got "more" eva but really we got nothing fans were left disspointed, seriosly go and check the review from 2007. Then the second one again gives the fans what they want Shinji mans up and changes the timeline he becomes a genrric shounen charcter. And it was grabage. Then in the third asuka isreduced to fanservice no trgaic backstory just here are some 14 uear old tits No complexity just a fuck you.

Then we have this movie which shits on the franchise even more. We literally have the iconic imagery shat upon with shitty CGI mecha fights. here you pigs eat your slop. You never got what I was saying so here are some robots hitting each other really hard oh and 20 shots of asuka with no top or pants. Every iconic moment is retread on to no effect just horrible CGI with nonsensical dialogue. Basically "here you are an idiot heres some bright coulours oh and buy some Mari merch while your at it".

I mean even "thrice upon a time" sounds like he is done. We have to end this shit 3 times PLUS one more time. Even Anno admits he wanted to do live action after eva but he got ropped in to this rebuild shit. Like why do you think it took almost Seven years for this to come out? Was he working on it the whole time? No. He literally made other movies the whole time. Only when Corona hit was he actually forced to sit down and finish it.

the shitty generic J-pop the never ending garbage dialogue "oh the l layer is negative 4 blah blah" they are not saying anything. He did what most fans wanted. He removed the meaning and instead we got robot fights pasted on top of the real scenes. The shounen fans can be happy. Shinji got a big titty GF. Everyone is happy.

Bloody hell this movie was bad. I didn't go in expecting a masterpiece, but I was hoping for something at least interesting, not just End Of Evangelion again but this time worse in every aspect. If you haven't seen the original you might find something novel here which is about the best I can say.

For starters there's the CG, the thought here seemingly being that if they use enough of it so blatantly it'll somehow come back around to being good, it doesn't. This is most notable in the climatic battle which looks like a PS2 cutscene, buildings get kicked around like happy meal toys. ... And it ends with, minor spoiler, a character saying "this is something that cannot be solved through might". THEN WHY DID YOU SUBJECT ME TO THIS!?

Which brings us onto the story. I'll gloss over this because A. the characters are the focus B. spoilers and C. nothing happens. Characters bum around for a bit, "the fight" happens, everyone get's a bit introspective and then it just ends.

Putting the characters before the plot may seem like a smart choice, but the problem is not having anything really happen to said characters just isn't interesting to watch. The last third of the film is entirely "tell don't show".

"I'm sad because this. I did this because this. You're the same as me." Watching emotional struggles is interesting but there's absolutely no emotion here. One character just explains their motivation then...leaves? Ok bye, glad I got that closure/s.

What bothers me most is what a god awful job of maturing it's characters this film does. Look at adult characters like Misato and Gendo and they work well not because they're emotionless but because they've learnt to put up barriers to their emotional side and you see that manifest in their actions. But this films attempt to mature Shinki and Asuka is to just stop having them show emotion. It's such a naïve approach and frankly boring to watch.

There's just no conflict here. Everyone's so on the same page I have no reason to care about anything that's happening. There's only 3 exceptions I can think of:
1. Shinji is sad but Asuka wants him to not be sad, resolved when he stops the sad ;(
2. The character who's climax is just leaving at the end
3. There's a bit where 2 characters are going to shoot another character because revenge, but then they learn revenge is wrong! My god why has no one ever thought of that masterpiece story before?

If I have one good thing to say it's that I enjoyed what they did with Rei, even if it does amount to absolutely nothing it was enjoyable to watch early on.

Lastly, the music, it's fine. Never stood out, never interesting. Some epic choir during battles, some emotional piano during daily life, about as standard as it gets.

Overall, I just don't know why this film exists. It's largely just a redo of everything that came before but with less conflict and everything's spelled out for you. It's like they were scared they might accidently evoke some kind of emotion in the viewer.

Anno should be ashamed of himself. It took 9 years to make this and this is what we got? He even sidestepped along the way to make Shin Godzilla and Shin Ultraman but didn't have time to spare for Eva during all those years.
Unlike what diehard defenders of this movie likes to think, none of the plot points were planned ahead. In fact it was the polar opposite of careful planning.
The original trailer for 2.0 included Asuka's fight against Zeruel like in NGE which was changed later in 1.11's release. Mari mentions dragging adults into her business in the beginning scenes of 2.0 but ... it turns out she's probably way older than even Kaji.
The elevator scene in 2.0 where Asuka shows malice towards Rei for being like a 'doll' makes no sense since Asuka herself is now neutered into a clone. etc.

<The Message : 0 points >
This is what sucks the most about thrice , 4.0, 4.44 or whatever you want to call this abomination.
In NGE, Shinji learns to love himself through the human instrumentality project, even including his aspects as an Eva pilot. This is shown through an alternate reality in the last episode where there are no Eva series. In this alternate reality Shinji and his acquaintance are living a 'normal' life, which Shinji rejects such things and realize that he can love himself as he is.
In EoE this is shown in a different perspective where he decides to end the Human instrumentality project and return the world as it was where individuality exists even though it would hurt him once more. Reality is harsh but he decides to face them once again even though by strangling Asuka it shows that knowing something and putting it to action are two different things.
In NGE and EoE it tells us to keep moving forward even though there will always be bumps and falls ahead. This was great since there are no rose colored glass sort of view about the future, but still a glimpse of hope was shown.

In thrice all of that build up towards enlightenment is gone. Now its Madoka Magica time!
"Eva itself is the cause of all the mess therefore it should disappear by using a magical spear that can rewrite the whold darn world."
That 'Eva bad' idea is just not right. NGE and EoE showed throughout it's whole plotline that all that pain was coming from actions of other human beings not because of Eva units themselves and yet this Thrice decided to use that to conveniently end everything. Eva was all about the pilots and other characters human interaction. The adults characters all had their flaws even though they were supposed to be 'grown ups' and the kids problems doesn't even need mentioning.
Now it's just Eva bad - therefore byebye.

Shinji's growth is also a problem. Some suggests that he did grow but NO that's just not true.
A main difference between a child like action and that of an adult is whether you can accept the losses. When losing or facing some unfavorable situation, an adult like behavior would be to suck it up and keep moving forward. Comparing this to the Rebuild Shinji he rejects to accept what has happened and decides to re-do what happened and decides to become the ultimate Deus Ex Machina.
In an life gives you lemons situation where the lemon is inevitable the old Shinji learned to suck it up and move on while Thrice shinji decides to remove the lemons completly from this world. Being realistic doesn't matter but that is hardly growing up. It's just 'happening' because Eva has to end for some unknown reason. How lame.

Shinji decides to sacrifice himself and does selfless actions therefore he has grown is also invalid.
Sacrificing yourself is sometimes the easier way out like commiting suicide in case of a huge dept senario. This is exactly the case for the rebuilds Shinji. Death just might be your way to end everthing that's called giving up not growing up. Just compare that to NGE and EoE, does this way of solving all problems seem right? Thrice Shinji just got lucky and was saved by Mari Sue Machinami Industrious Juda back stabber, which I will write on about on this review.

<The giant Longinus spear on the road - Mari Sue Machinami Industrious Juda back stabber >
This so called character has no character.
She is apparently there to steal parts from other characters from NGE.

Kaji - Lost his inspirational speech on the water melon patch.

Asuka - No more Zeruel fight. Even lost here position of staying beside Shinji in the finale.

Ritsuko - Was the one with the key to all secrets, now reduced to nothing

etc.
This character solely exists for the purpose of breast morphing animation and action scene with less than 10 minutes of dialogue in the entire rebuilds. Some bring in Meta aspects of this characters and says it was intended blablabla but no. It's called bad writing.
There was once a post modernism art exhibition where a guest left a banana to rot on the desk. The visitors believed that it was a work of art even though in reality it was just trash. Giving this Mari sue a meaning is the same thing. You are seeing things.



There are tons to talk about such as the tention lacking action scenes mainly due to the huge number of enemies being too weak and action scenes without the principle of action and reaction type of tic tac toe, but this is just taking too long.

Overall, it's a disgrace to the franchise and a real bad implication of 'once you get famous people will believe - even when you shite - it has intentions' sort of moment. Open your eyes this isn't a masterpiece, more like a piece of turd that just ages like shite.
I'm not even a native English speaker and yet the anger of seeing such a disaster made me write this long review. Believe me it's that bad.

Evangelion 3.0+1.0 (Eva 4) is the epitome of disappointment. To be honest, I’m not even sure why I watched it, I knew all I would get out of it was going to be anger. Eva 4 is empty, baseless, dry, and fruitless. It is exactly what anyone would expect after watching the first three movies.

I was trying to have low expectations when it came to Eva 4, but somehow I was still able to be disappointed. I think a small part of me was hoping that Eva 4 would offer some sort of redemption for the movie series and that was enough for Eva ... 4 to leave me disappointed. I’ve talked at length before about how much I hate this movie series for soiling the Evangelion name so I’ll refrain from talking about it further.

Eva 4 is empty. There’s just nothing there. I think there might have been some sort of effort put into the writing but it’s so hard to tell considering it didn’t have much to work with following the atrocity that was Eva 3. All characters continue to be empty shells of their tv series counterparts. No character has a visible drive, not a single character has anything going for them. And I’m not talking from a narrative perspective because sure, they do force these ridiculous, completely unrelatable narratives onto every character from Rei understanding humanity to Genji wanting to be with his dead wife; but, there’s no drive for the viewer to latch on to. I don’t have a friend whose head blew off right in front of me, you know. I know that’s a little extreme but what I’m saying is that the movie series doesn’t do a good job of establishing or nurturing any relationships between the characters. Those couple minutes that Shinji spent with Kaworu playing piano don’t really mean much to the viewer. And considering that that’s the most meaningful relationship portrayal in the movie series says plenty about all other relationships. The movie series does nothing but waste time.

Eva 4 is baseless. You can’t base the entire series on small flashbacks here and there. The entirety of Asuka, Misato, and Genji were built on things that happened off-screen. Shinji, Rei, and Mari are complete flops. It’s amazing how such a long movie series was able to even survive from a storytelling perspective with not a single meaningful character.

Eva 4 is dry. In the movie series, 90% of the time nothing is happening. Character’s actions and words don’t really mean anything or go anywhere. The only 10% of the time something is happening or progressing the story is through shounen-style mecha battles or run-off moments of silence where characters senselessly have some self-realization moment.

Eva 4 is fruitless. This is the ultimate sin of the Evangelion Movie Series. Not only does it destroy all these immensely deep and interesting characters from the tv series, but it then goes to do nothing with them. This is the textbook example of how not to do character development. In Eva 4, characters change, but they don’t grow. This is such a classic mistake that I love how well they do it in Eva 4 because it makes it easy to study. I won’t go into it to avoid spoilers, so you’ll see for yourself if you watch this movie.

In the end, I really don’t see someone watching the first 3 movies, reading this review, then deciding not to watch the 4th. If you’re reading this review having watched the first 3 movies, I don’t think there’s anything I could say to make you not watch the 4th one. I hated the first 3 and I still watched the 4th one. If you haven’t watched any of the movies, you can read my reviews of the first three movies to see the methodical disappointment that is the movie series. I regret having watched this movie series from Eva 2. All this movie series has brought me is anger and disappointment. I hate seeing what it’s done with my favorite tv series and the best movie of all time (End of Evangelion). It’s saddening to have this beautiful image of my favorite characters from the tv series and have it stained with the abominations that this movie series spat out.

If you haven’t seen these movies yet, please don’t. This studio should not be rewarded in any way for putting out such terrible content, for destroying such a beloved franchise. They don’t deserve your attention, your money, or your time.

The Rebuilds were conceptualized as an improvement over the original Evangelion, but now that this series has reached its end I can say that it has not surpassed the 90s version. This is the major offendant to me: Anno hasn't delivered a better message nor a better execution yet presents these movies as a rebuilt, improved Eva.

Some say that comparing 4.0 with EoE is unfair since Anno portrays the two stories from a fundamentally different lens, but when the author himself paints Shin Eva as an improved version of the original product, it's just natural for comparisons to arise. EoE ends with Shinji deciding he ... wants to pursue his happiness, he wants to love himself and others, and how exactly will he proceed in the future is left open. When I finished watching that movie, I felt like Shinji, uncertain of how exactly I would do it, but sure that I wanted to keep on living and trying. In itself, it is quite a hopeful ending. In 4.0 Shini learns about all the timelines and decides to wipe away all of Eva. This isn't interesting in a show about the characters and their way to deal with problems. Of course, if all of us could see all possibilities we would know exactly what to do, this isn't helpful or relatable at all for someone who was helped by the original. And why is Shinji just transforming reality, why is this a thing in Eva? what I liked about this franchise was that, just like in real life, the reality couldn't be changed, and the characters had to adapt to it. This feels like an easy way to turn things around in the script, and an escapist choice from the main character. The meta elements don't make sense nor are they a novelty nowadays, how does this have anything to do with the themes of the movie? And why would Anno sacrifice a coherent story in favor of such simplistic resolution and an obvious message that is almost spelled out to the viewer?.

Another thing that I want to touch upon is the treatment of Gendo and Shinji's relationship, which hasn't been talked about enough. The movie makes a case for Shinji to try to understand his father, but why does he have to? A child who has been neglected, used, abandoned, and abused by his parent doesn't have any obligation to understand his motives. Gendo has done so many horrible things that at this point I don't care about whatever feelings or virtues he may have.

The characters are inconsistent, shallow and charicatures of their NGE selves. Kaworu has always been an interesting yet unexplored character, so I welcomed his screen time, but not much is done with him. His problem isn't his relationship with Shinji (this is just a symptom), it's his willingness to use, risk and sacrifice his own life over and over as a tool for his objectives since he doesn't see his existence as valuable, which I wish was acknowledged and explored by the narrative. Why does Shinji have to distance himself from Rei, Asuka and Kaworu? probably to give Mari as spot in Shinji's life she didn't earn. And why the Kawoshin relationship is deemed as irreparable, while Gendo-Yui is presented as extreme yet noble? Why is Gendo rewarded with seeing Yui again? Why is Kaworu a parallel to Gendo when they couldn't be more different about approaching a similar situation? NGE did it better with its Kaworu-Yui/Shinji-Gendo parallels, which made more sense.

Mari is just Anno's wife insert, there's no other explanation to her being in these movies at all. We don't learn anything that may fleash out her character, yet she's giving this important role near the end. The final message, that you can keep going forward with the help of others, is an overused concept, and while I understand it comes from Anno's own experience, I find it annoying when there's people out there that doesn't have a support system, and the film seems to approach this as something that the audience has to learn to do. I would like for Anno to acknowledge that he is privileged in this respect, and what is accessible and advisable in his case isn't to all the people in the audience. This is probably something he wanted to tell to his own past selve, so why are we, the audience, the ones being preached?

I'm honestly disappointed and mad with this movie, it is insensitive when approaching some complex issues, it's characters are souless, the plot is badly written and messy, there's info dumps in the form of exposition and terrible CG. While 3.0 was confusing and didn't go anywhere, at least I could have the hope that something would be resolved in this last film, but this is what we get.

Neon Genesis Evangelion 3.0 + 1.0: Thrice Upon a Time let me down once again like the previous 3.0 movie. Too many expository moments which weighed me down. I had to watch this movie in 2 days cuz i couldnt go chug it down at once. Apart from the stellar 2d animation, (3d animation simply sucked and fucking ruined the movie), this whole movie is a giant pretentious mess. Alot of new ideas are poured in this mf that i stopped giving a shit and was waiting for this movie to be done with it and this whole fucking bs movie series they call rebuilds. ... They are not rebuilds at all but destroyers of the original series. End of Evangelion still remains the best ending for this series. 1.0 was a nice retelling of the first episodes. 2.0 was really good especially with that new ending. 3.0 wanted to do something different but really suffered from heavy expositions and hoped to resolve things in the next movie while it made the story even more confusing. Apart from the lackluster story, the characters are plain downgrades from the original. The amount of sexualization of 14yro girls in this series was insane, especially in the last movie. Holy fucking shit, you couldnt pass 2-3 minutes without seeing a scene in a perverted camera angle or teenage ass in tight plug suits. The whole Asuka scene in the red shore was a big FUCK YOU to the end of evangelion fans who really loved that scene in the originals. It felt so out of place and they even ripped her suit so the fans could jerk off while they were at it. "Fan Service" in the originals made sense because even though there werent alot of such scenes they were all from shinjis perspective, due to him being a teenager raging with hormones. In the movies you get bs scenes like asuka barechested with panties rolling around the bed with the camera up her butt. That scene is just for the viewer. It doesnt add anything to the story, unlike the original which was never that bad it paid off in EoE. Mari was a bullshit character, only created for people to consider her as a sex object. She did nothing in the series and she even married shinji in the end ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME? Kaworu spew all that bs that the whole story is a fucking loop which requires even more answers that we never got. If Anno really wanted to fix this series, he shouldve just made another anime and not waste our time with these trash movies that make me question everything and indulge myself in endless theories on the internet about wtf he was thinking that head of his. Even the artists in these movies didnt understand wtf was going on. A new series with about 50 episodes would've done the job.

Evangelion: 3.0+1.0, an unearned, incoherent, and unexplained mess.

As a pretext, I thought the first two rebuild movies were great. Super amped up animation, great song selections, and a much needed improvement on some of the flaws of the original series. One in particular I loved is how they made the three main characters more enjoyable. Asuka was less of a total psycho, Shinji wasnt just crying all the time, and Rei was becoming human. It truly felt like Anno was taking the criticisms found on the original series and improving on them to make the story a lot more solid for the Rebuild movies. ...

Then Evangelion 3.0 came around. It wasnt bad per say, it just changed the entire story. This wasnt really Evangelion anymore. EVA vs Angel fights turned into super galactic ship battles between NERV and WILLE. Overall, it was fine for being a mediocre film because it was expected to be setting up an epic final conclusion movie.

Boy oh boy was I wrong. The first hour of Evangelion 3.0+1.0 is actually really good. The first act in the village is some of the best Evangelion I have seen. Asuka and Rei get major character development, while the minor characters of the original series get screen time as well. It felt like the coherent story telling that came in the 2nd movie.

From there on after they leave the village, this movie is really bad. I am not sure where to even begin. The fights manage to get even worse than the ones seen in 3.0, and the CGI isnt very well done. Characters who we do not care about at all are given the spotlight instead of the main characters. Like honestly, why is Touji's sister given more screentime than Asuka in the 2nd half of the movie?

Oh and then there is Mari. Mari deserves her own section of this rant because of just how much of an impact she has on bringing down the Rebuilds. Evangelion 2.0 introduces her in a mysterious way that makes the viewer somewhat hooked. Then the timeskip happens and shes just fully integrated into the team without any explanation. This character gets no backstory, no character development, and has hardly any actual dialogue. So for her to NOT ONLY BE THE ONE TO SAVE SHINJI IN THE END, BUT BE THE ONE AT HIS SIDE IN HIS NEW WORLD IS INSANE! Who wanted this? Nobody.

tldr; I would not suggest watching this movie if you enjoy the original series for the complex story it is thanks to our 3 main characters and their inner thoughts. Evangelion 3.0+1.0 goes too far off the rails to tell a grand, epic story that instead just comes off as fanservice paradise.

Other reviewers have done an excellent job of dissecting the hot, stinking, horrible balloon of vomit that this movie is. They've touched upon all aspects of the plot, characters, and more; so I won't repeat that.

Instead, I'm going to bitch about Hideaki Anno, how I've lost my immense respect for the man, and why I've decided that I won't fuel his career any more. I'll always love the original Evangelion and End of Eva, but I'm through purchasing merch from the series. I also won't be watching any new projects from Khara or Anno; in my head canon, he retired in 2009, and never vomited ... the abominations that are 3.0 and 3.0 + 1.0.

Before you dismiss my review as one coming from a hardcore OG Eva fan who cannot tolerate any change to the "gospel", I want to say that that's not it. At all. I've enjoyed other Evangelion retellings and side stories. I love the franchise to death, and would've been very happy to watch a completely different Eva (which was kinda the point of the Rebuilds, after all) because it would mean more time exploring the characters and setting that I cherish. If, and this is a huge if, the product was any good, or at least sincere and respectful to the viewers.

Because that is to me the worst problem of this movie and its predecessor - that it's blatantly obvious how Anno and Co. are dickslapping the audience, and doing so with glee! It's as if they promised us a nice spa experience, covered our eyes with cucumber slices, and then proceeded to dump a bathtub's worth of feces on us... and then proceeded to kick us in the groin, just because. There are so many thinly-veiled jabs at Eva fans that it's hard to count them all: that we're childish, that we can't adapt, that we're stuck in the past, that we care about unimportant stuff, are just a few off the top of my mind. What started as a love letter to the original Eva, and a masterful showcase of just why and how the series became so influential, and also just how good of a director Anno can be when he sets his mind to it, ended as a flaming ball of sh!t impacting the audience in the face. The whole Thrice Upon a Time feels like a cheap parody of You Can (not) Advance. Between the awful CGI, forceful fanservice, repetitive dialogue, and nonsensical plot, it's as if the people at studio Khara decided to do their worst to produce a film, adding everything that the fans supposedly enjoy, but in the most debased and stupidest way possible. They behaved like a bunch of cynical anuses.

And you know what? I'm all for being challenged by a film. I'm more than willing to look at uncomfortable aspects of myself, to review my behavior and beliefs, even if it hurts. I've changed the way I relate to other people thanks to some pieces of media, like the original Eva. But I won't tolerate being mistreated by a man whose career I've supported for decades. Because there's nothing of value, no lesson to be learned in Thrice Upon a Time, except that Hideaki Anno has moved on from the franchise, and that he looks down on us, the people who have given him and his companies money for years. I don't believe that directors or other creatives should bend over backwards to accommodate fans, but they need to be respectful to them. And this flaming turd is anything but. It's, rather, two and a half hours of insults to the audience interspersed with obtuse dialogue, garbage infodumps, and poorly-rendered action scenes.

I'm through with Anno and I'm through with Khara. I'll always cherish the original series, EoE, and the first two rebuilds, and I'll keep on saying that they're the best that anime has ever offered. This film, however, deserves no other place than a trashcan.

Why does this thing get a score of 2, though? Because the music in general, and One Last Kiss especially, are amazing. Also because of the extraordinary voice acting on display by most of the cast, who delivered probably their best performances ever. Anno should feel ashamed of having made the poor seiyuus work so hard on something so terrible.

It's hard to believe just how much more attuned Anno and the crew were to what people and critic considered unique, quality work, back in the 1990's in comparison to 2021. How could Anno's perception of the ideal ending for his own story change so drastically 20 years after The End of Evangelion? 3.0 + 1.0 is the exact opposite of what End of Eva was, it's a broken movie. It crams together two separate stories with basically no correlation and introduces concepts like "anti-universe" and "imaginary EVA" with a straight face.

Before the first of these two stories kicks in, we are presented with ... a 12-minute or so introduction starring Mari and Ritsuko in a mission to restore the city of Paris after the "Near Third Impact". It's a really effective opening segment in my opinion. However weird it may be seeing an EVA fly through the sky destroying hundreds of enemies, when back in the day they had to divert the power of a whole country to shoot a rifle, it was still a fun action scene. When the main story started rolling, I was enjoying myself. Shinji, Asuka and Rei (a.k.a Sokkuri-san) try to resume a normal life in a rural community formed by survivors of the near-apocalypse, including Toji and Kensuke. Well, at least two of them do. Anyway, the time they spent working on the farm, while not great by NGE standards, was somewhat entertaining. I enjoyed most of Sokkuri-san's scenes, despite it feeling like utter filler, and I especially liked the place her and Shinji would meet up every day. Yes, the compliments to this movie end up having to be about petty stuff.

On its second half, Thrice Upon a Time turns into some weird version of Diebuster (2004), but with Eva characters, which obviously doesn't make any sense given the nature of both shows . And what I actually mean by "Eva characters" is "Rebuild of Eva characters". Pink-haired girl still feels completely out of place on every scene, Misato is a one-note side character, and a boring one at that, and Gendo was turned into a mindless "final boss" (maybe that was on the prefrontal cortex he lost). It was incredibly frustrating to watch the sort of plot decisions that were being made throughout this whole segment. It's endlessly dumb, overdone and streches out for way too long. As its title suggests, 3.0 + 1.0 is tied down do the same vision of Evangelion its predecessor introduced. I don't know why, after the disaster that was You Can (Not) Redo, I expected anything to be different. In a sense, maybe Thrice Upon a Time doesn't deserve to be blamed for the irrecoverable direction that was taken by Anno on the third rebuild movie, but at the same time, it doesn't make sense to me how it was so much better received than 3.0.

Approaching the two-hour mark, we see a shift in how the movie operates, and honestly I'm still not entirely sure on how to feel about this last segment. What I do know is it's not special, as many people are suggesting. Inserting scenes with some stages of production to be done, that's cool and all, even though it doesn't feel natural on a feature film. But let's be real here. Is that the most creative a team with Anno, Tsurumaki, Imaishi, Hiramatsu, Nishio, Inoue, Arai and Nishigori can get? Animation blended with live-action? Questionable use of CGI? That just makes me sad.

So these are my two cents on Evangelion 3.0 + 1.0. Cursed movie. Complete joke of a conclusion to the most iconic anime series ever. If this ends up being someone's introduction to director Hideaki Anno, I hope they can give a chance to the shows old GAINAX used to produce. That would ease the desolation I feel seeing some of these guys waste 14 years of their careers on the Rebuild movies. Thrice Upon a Time might be terrible, but NGE isn't, End of Evangelion isn't, Diebuster isn't, FLCL isn't, KareKano isn't, well, you get the point.

Eva 3.0 + 1.0 is insane... and not in a complimentary way...

Eva 3.0 + 1.0 is the culmination of every mistake the rebuilds and original series have made except cranking each error to a new absurd height with the final instalment in the series. Its current MAL score is a complete joke and at this point it’s fair to say that Anno could have taken a terrible fan parody written by a fourteen year old, given it a 2 and a half hour run time and slapped a multi-million pound budget on top and it would still have received high praise from the community - ... and that's pretty much what has happened here...

Here's a question that I think is important to ask about Evangelion: "Does the story actually have explanations for its events and is it ambiguous on purpose, or is this a cover up for the writer not actually wanting to come up with any real explanations" - To answer this I want to look at a particular scene that represents this movie, the scene in question begins with Gendou Ikari piecing his brain back together to reveal that he has arisen to some power akin to 'a god' - and the explanation as to how he isn't a lifeless stain on the floor after getting half his skull removed is that he has used (and I quote) "the key of Nebuchadnezzar" to abandon his humanity. Misato and Ritsuko gasp at the horror, yet as the viewer I am just left to say... Huh?. In true Evangelion style not even a remote explanation is given as to what this key is or to the extent of its power, yet it has magically turned Gendou into a semi omnipotent being. No further explanation will be given for this, you as the viewer must just accept it - Don't ask any questions, don't think about how out of nowhere and convenient this is, just go with it... In the original series and with some elements of the previous rebuilds I could justify the lack of detail or explanation for being 'interpretive' and that they are just poorly explained not that there isn't actually an explanation. But with 3.0 + 1.0 even being as much in favour of Anno as I can be, this just isn't the case. This is just lazy... So here it goes:

Eva 3.0 + 1.0 has the most fragile story I have seen in any anime. Don't get me wrong even the original series had terrible exposition and aspects that were just never explained yet 3.0 + 1.0 throws such a sheer volume of nonsense at the viewer in the second half that you have to question whether or not it’s intentional. There's a saying that fits this perfectly and it’s known as the triple B's, "Bullsh*t Baffles Brains". I think urban dictionary puts this best with an explanation of "To talk or write absolute nonsense but do so with such conviction everyone comes to believe it unquestioningly." Fundamentally to me this is Anno's writing style. - Anno will go to any length possible to not have to give an explanation for the events in his story, to say he is reliant on symbolism is an understatement. Eva 3.0 + 1.0 pushes this to new heights with a second half that is bad even for Eva's standards. With sentences like "By incorporating vessels of the Adams, it's in an extra four-in-one state" or ideas such as 'forming a new spear out of a battleship and a spinal cord'. It's just insane to me that Anno thinks that by putting a religious word in a sentence or by using a vague one-liner that he is in any way justifying the events that are occurring in his stories. This is almost anti-writing. Put angel in-front of something or use some scientific mumbo jumbo to try and baffle the viewer so much that they don't even question what on earth is going on. Genuinely there's no way of both taking this film seriously and enjoying it, you either treat it as a joke and don't question anything and have a good time, or you give it the slightest glimmer of respect and come away scratching your head after each scene. I could keep rambling about this for hours but ill end this segment here, actually I should explain this segment how Anno explains Evangelion; story Ramshiel/10, characters LCL/10, art black moon/10 sound instrumentality/5 and so on...

Moving onto Anno’s next amusing writing quirk, any character in Eva will instantly change whenever the story demands it. 2.0 had this problem in Asuka suddenly becoming caring and charming because the story wanted you to feel bad when she dies even though this is the complete opposite of her character in the first film and the original series. Shinji has had this problem from minute one in that he will jump from being an inconsolable wreck to full on invested battle mode within a second; and now with 3.0 + 1.0 we have Rei who has gone from being a complete emotionless drone to being an inquisitive toddler in the final rebuild. The show itself even calls this out, comparing Rei reading books in the latest film to Rei being completely disinterested in the second. Suddenly because the show wants you to care about her she now has to be intrigued and cute yet when shinji offered her the same proposition in 3.0 he might as well have had a door slammed in his face. Also the film has the comic revelation of stating that 'Rei was designed to always be drawn towards Shinji' Yet she was completely cold towards him in the third film and showed no signs of wanting to read yet now this has all but changed because off... well... nothing really Anno just likes to write characters in whatever way is convenient at the time regardless of continuity.

Speaking of characters let’s take a special moment to talk about Mari Makinami, and just by stating her name we have now explored her in this review just as much as her character was explored in the film. Still we know basically nothing about this character yet Anno has such an affection towards this charming mirage that he decided the ending to Evangelion should not be with Asuka or Rei and instead end with her and Shinji, incredible. Thank you for not exploring this character even remotely yet deciding out of all the important female characters in the series that this is the one you want to end the film with, brilliant. What a way to pay homage to the original series with a character that wasn't even in it and that we know just as much about as we know about the key of Nebuchadnezzar (we know that both exist and that they both have names...).

One of the more pretentious antics of the film was its use of 'fourth wall' braking moments, using another classic BBF concept of 'anti universe' to try and justify its use of studio sets in film and raw keyframes in an attempt to be clever like the end of Evangelion (film) was. What Anno doesn't realize however is that a fourth wall break actually has to be earned in order to be effective and unfortunately as with everything else in this film the reasoning behind Eva 3.0 + 1.0's was shallow at best. Just completely superfluous and screams of a writer who has no idea what made his use of this in the past effective in the first place. Of all the rebuild films to try and break the fourth wall on you picked the most trite and meaningless out of the lot good job. I suppose this was the finale though and with all other Eva instalments it seems that Anno thinks he has to cram some fourth wall nonsense in at the end else his stories messages won’t be clever enough, the irony.

Also in true Anno style kaji's sacrifice isn't even shown and is just mentioned briefly in the film. This event was so crucial that it literally stopped the third impact and killed off one of the series best characters, yet instead of actually showing something crucial like that, the film instead likes to use up run time on another shinji self-loathing arc because Evangelion loves to spend the majority of its time on its most dull and repetitive character. - Misato and kaji were by far the best characters in the original series and Anno doesn't even want to explore his sacrifice, brilliant use of characters, a real sign of a classy writer.

The best segment of the film despite its flaws is definitely the farming segment in the beginning third. Even with Shinji repeating the same miserable self loathing arc that we have seen about a hundred times already and with Rei completely changing her characterization from 3.0 this segment is still a joy to watch. Just a simple story that has decent pacing with no crazy events or wild exposition tangents, I wonder why it is that people enjoy this half of the film more than the latter; it’s almost like your story doesn't need new ideas thrown at the viewer every second like it does past halfway, who would have thought...

Moving on from the farming segment, the initial fight between Misatos renegade and Nerv was a pretty great spectacle. Watching Asuka and Makinami plunge through the pink Floyd cover whilst hailing copper on top of creepy Runescape Evas was great to watch. Unit 13 pulling out the Uno reverse card on Asuka was also a nifty scene. At this point in the film I was actually warming to it a lot and was really hopeful to see where the extra hour of runtime would take it. And sure this was mostly just a flex of animation budget but it was still really entertaining, can’t say the same for the following hour of the film however.

The saving grace of this film is of course the phenomenal art and sound direction, infact it does such a good job that it has fooled the community collectively into giving this film above a 6 on MAL who would have thought. That's really all I'm going to say about that, at the end of the day this is a story, great art and sound are only useful if the story itself is up to par and by this point I think I have been quite vocal in my unending disappointment.

Another interesting note I want to make is to point out the hypocrisy of most of the people reviewing this film. How users can give Eva 3.0 a low score for not having any explanation and being a mess yet somehow giving 3.0 + 1.0 a high score when it arguably makes the same mistakes but to an even greater extent is beyond me. Just as with 2.0 it seems that most of the people who rate Eva highly don't even understand why they are rating it highly in the first place; supposedly the original series is good because it focuses more on its characters and has more depth than other mecha anime, yet 2.0 which reduces all of its characters to a one dimensional state and has much more of a focus on just being a cool spectacle instead of having a deep story is somehow good; yet Eva 3.0 is bad because its poorly explained even though nothing in Evangelion has ever been well explained, and now having 3.0 + 1.0 that combines both the flaws of 2.0 and 3.0 yet is somehow more highly rated than either of them? It’s just nonsensical.

In my original NGE review the final paragraph ended on a somewhat upbeat note, here however I'm really struggling to think of positives. Take the budget away from this film and the core writing that you are left with is a complete mess. This was Eva’s last farewell and this is what is left. This just makes the original series seem like a fluke and less like a stroke of genius. Anno does not learn from his mistakes he just hides behind his key animators to fool the fan base into thinking that they are watching something worthwhile, and with most of the community’s reaction to this film it seems they have succeeded. If you enjoyed Eva 3.0 + 1.0 all the power to you, but for me this really wasn't it. Infact I would say that each Eva rebuild has been worse than the last, what a disappointing way to finish the series.

As someone who has not watched the original anime series, I forced myself to watch through all four movies in the series hoping that plot would start to make more sense the more I continued watching, while reassuring that myself that there has to be something redeeming about the movies with how much praise it seems to get. Now that I finished, I can confidently say that I still have no clue what's going on.

I really have no clue about the motives on any of the characters or the reasoning for any of the events that occurred throughout the show. It was never explained why ... these teenage kids with access to military robots were fighting funny looking shapes floating in the sky. None of the characters were particularly likeable, except maybe the silver haired guy who treated the main character as his best buddy for reasons that were never explained.

This movie series should be treated as a supplement to the original anime series, and not as an introduction to Evangelion.

That this film is at it's most interesting only when it's paraleling the original Neon Genesis Evangelion and The End of Evangelion tells all you need to know about the rebuilds.

For all it's worth, Hideaki Anno's seemingly well intentioned attempt at telling Evangelion's story one more time is, unfortunately, unneeded. both the 1995 TV series and The End of Evangelion needed not a continuation: they already carried, in their own flawed ways, a larger than life feeling within their own conclusions. It doesn't matter that the story was inconclusive since it ended up being about much more than just Evangelion, the anime.

The rebuilds, albeit sharing ... the same name, are another thing altogether. This is not coming from a purist rambling where there's a real Evangelion and a fake one. It's just that the 1995 TV series and the 1997 film continuation were a self concluded story told by a man trying to comes to term with his crushing incompetence at living and his wild search for meaning. There're, of course, a bunch of apocaliptic elements brought together in a rather cryptic way (usually some really thoughtless exposition thrown at your face) that makes Evangelion's story, but everyone knows that this was never really the point, regardless of Anno's intention. These films would come to life years after because he felt like telling Evangelion's story one more time, but that's not the same man anymore. He lived through that phase, experienced other things, met his wife and whatever. The point is: a different Hideaki Anno came back to the same story wishing to tell it one more time, but the inevitable result was that a different Evangelion came to life: and this isn't inherently bad or good, just an assertion that what he did then and what he did now are two separate things, even if they're all Evangelion.

... but the fact is that I don't really like this new Evangelion. The story about our lonely hero's legend is emulated once again, but not once have i felted the same weight brought by the (sometimes excessive) still frames from the original TV series. I feel like the rebuilds are the exact opposite: they are about Evangelion, the anime. They're about the giant robots and some very bad CGI action. They're about the (very convoluted) plot and all that vague terminology made ten times worse. They're about the character's as empty vessels (because that's unfortunately what they're reduced to, Asuka being the worst offender — but at least they changed her name). They're about some really out of place and intrusive fanservice that somehow is even worse than in the series early episodes. They're a throwback from everything that Anno went for back then. Gone is that raw creative power that could create incredibly impactful moments using only still frames, and those beautifully flawed characters that represented very well the state of mind of a man that struggled with his own existence. Now we have a brave Shinji with glowing eyes screaming "Give me back Ayanami!!!" while Asuka thinks about doing a special lunch for him. The driving force of Evangelion, a sort of creeping loneliness powered by the turn of the century – which conversely becomes a post apocalyptical setting that gets increasingly desolated as the series progresses, culminating in The End of Evangelion, an ending that evokes life from humanity's annihilation – , is completely lost here. Everything is obvious and sterile, a vulgar project using of the same clothing as Anno's most heartfelt work.

This last film is about giving the series, and Shinji, and the main cast, and probably Hideaki Anno's past "proper" closure – and this time he chose Gendo instead of Shinji to be his persona, in an incredible weak last minute attempt at expanding his character. It's Anno's last good bye and final liberation from this big struggle called Evangelion. It's One Last Kiss. And really, we get it, Shinji and everyone is happy now! They're living in a world without the EVAs! But does that really mean anything when these characters have become nothing but hollow shells?

I feel like the last part of this film could save the rebuilds as a whole. By that I mean it tried to. It abandons the terribly boring and horrid looking action sequences (and I still can't believe we went from Asuka's fight against the EVA series on EoE to the abysmal shit we have right now) and does a reimagination of EoE's famous third impact. It's the "Evangelion" part of the film, a sequence of dementia that the original is so well known for. I can imagine Anno having the most fun with this part, and being the talented director he is there're a bunch of interesting takes on the original scenes he's drawing from, but it's just never quite there. It's just a sort of transvestism. I can understand his intentions and I would be lying If I said It didn't move me at some parts, as I've been following Evangelion for many years now, but borrowing the power of what came before simply isn't enough to redeem itself. The film only had me emotionally when referencing the original, which only tells how good the OG is and how the rebuilds, which suppossedly started as an attempt at telling a new version of the story, couldn't stand on it's own two feet — everything that isn't self-referencing falls short and it's impossible to make any sense of these "original" films without seeing what came before. They are mostly such a hollow experience and the fact that there's good will behind it (though it's fair to question if that's even the case) doesn't change the fact that I spent the second, third and most of the fourth film wondering if I even liked Evangelion that much to begin with. And believe me: I do.

And what to say about everything that comes before the finale? One hour of a boring-looking experience that has NONE of the instropective brilliance of the original — whatever creative forces pushed Anno to create things like the final scene of "Rain, After Running Away" are completely dead and instead we have something that is technically acceptable, but fails to evoke much of anything. After that we're forced to witness one of the most atrocious action sequences ever made. So much EVAs and so much explosions and so much one liners from Mari and everything is so fucking ugly and nothing really seems to matter anymore because who fucking cares about Touji's sister and all of that who-are-they characters and about whatever the fuck was happening. If everything happens then nothing happens.

Evangelion ended back in 1997 with The End of Evangelion. The rebuilds are a sort of weird fanfiction created by Hideaki Anno with god knows what intention. If Evangelion pushed the envelope, then the rebuilds retracted It. What we have here is something diametrically opposed to the original series and it's no wonder it's far worse. No matter how good Anno's ideas were, and even if he tried to prove otherwise with that ending, I guess It couldn't save the rebuilds from feeling like much more than a masturbatory experience for fanatics. Or, like I like to say, Evangelion for people who hate Evangelion.

Unlike many fans, I've always thought the story of Evangelion to be mediocre. An interesting premise, stellar animation, and cool design are what made the property enjoyable for me. Most of that is gone now; replaced with meaningless character interactions, unimpressively bland 3D models, and nauseating camera spinning.

I don't feel like talking about the movie beyond this point. I had been anticipating this film for years, and the first hour had me very excited, but by the end I only felt disappointment mixed in with a bit of leftover nausea.

I'm happy that there are fans that enjoyed this film, but I did not.

End of Eva left me numb because of the emotional ride I went on, and the expectation of a happier ending. but I was satisfied. was then, and still am today. it's a 10/10 masterpiece in my books
Rebuild of Evangelion: 3.0+1.0 left me a different kind of numb. EoE left me with a tired kind of numbness, and it was blissful. like a tiresome adventure coming to an end, and plopping down on your bed and falling asleep. 3+1 left me cockblocked-numb. what made me tired with 3+1 was the slow realization that my excitement was unfounded. I gradually just became more and more disappointed ... with the movie, until the end where it just left me drained.

possibly my all-time favorite anime going out in one of the shittiest ways possible
as a shitty cash cow.