Tkit's Blog

Anime Relations: Evangelion Movie 1: Jo, Evangelion Movie 2: Ha, Evangelion Movie 3: Q, Shin Evangelion Movie:||

I am a firm believer in the underlying philosophy behind Rebuild Evangelion. There is a big belief that a remake/adaptation should religiously stick to the source material otherwise becoming somehow offensive. This is a mindset I never understood. Sure when I see a bad adaptation of a story I love there is a hint of disappointment in me, but there is literally nothing one can do to ruin a finished story. Whether it is a bad sequel or an 'offensive' remake, I can always just watch the original.

With that in mind going into this series of movies I was quite afraid that this will be an attempt to tell the same story in the new form. It is important to realize that recreating the original in the movie form would be impossible. Movies rely on a three act structure much more than an episode of anime. That fact in itself requires a lot of changes to the story, said story also needs to be shorter. 420 minutes of movies can't convey 650 minutes of anime in the same way. This is a long winded way to say that I appreciate the decision to change the story... I just think it is done badly.

Those movies can be neatly divided in half with the first two following quite closely the events of the original while making the story simpler and easier to convey in shorter form. My main issues start with the 3rd movie. There is a radical change in the story and a time skip that basically wipes all of the work done for the character development. Almost all of the cast is so much changed that they might be considered as new versions of themself. What's more after restarting those characters and needing to reintroduce them director decided to add a whole bunch of new people. It's not like said people are just a background, some of them get a whole bunch of air time with no of the main characters.
New story is also very convoluted. The complexity of the original while quite big is very overblown. It wasn't a unsolvable story. Sure Rebuild Evangelion isn't incomprehensible, but there is no need to convolute this plot so much. The structure is also weird. Why when planning such a different story did they made two first movies so similar to the old plot? There should be more set up for this and just one movie max that sticks to the og. Third movie was a mess. Misato's crew felt like something straight out of Trigger anime. We had a time skip of over a decade, but it felt like those characters did nothing during that time. The whole disregard of Shinji by everyone while working for his personal story felt like a plot hole with how important he is.
The best part of this new story is the end. You see, while changing the plot author left the goal to be the same. This is still, fundamentally the story about the same things that the original covered. So themes remained strong and the conclusion to everyone's characters was very good too. It is on one hand unfortunate, as this was a good end for underdeveloped characters, but on the other with the themes remaining the same this end could be somewhat applied to the og versions of the characters(which works with the whole timelines thing this movie hints at).

This is why those movies aren't a complete disappointment, but an annoyance. There are many cool concepts, visually it is stunning, set pieces and audio are great. Plot is bold and the finally was cool. Unfortunately despite it all those movies felt VERY messy to me and I just didn't care in the second half.