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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."

TRIVIA: The third episode of Arise is subtitled "Ghost Tears" because the franchise is presently balled in a corner weeping from the garbage juice squirted into its eyes.

Preface: I usually don't bother to write reviews unless I find myself auto-forming a review in my head as I watch. This occurred during the third episode of Arise because the flaws are so glaring they jump out at you neatly wrapped; it almost feels like this review has been written for me and I'm merely transcribing. Easy as transcribing is I still wouldn't post, unless what I saw which seemed so obviously godawful to me had yet ... to be slandered as much as it deserved. So with 2 reviews on here ranging from mediocre to absolute perfection, here I am to commit abortion.

Central Flaw: Motoko the pussy.
The main draw of GITS, for me, has always been the Major. She's one of the best female characters in the medium, in any medium, and on her own merits. She can't be pigeonholed into any one trope, because she's a complex character dealing with massive global, political, and philosophical issues - but always tempers them with her own individual existential concerns. The diffracted nature of her personality is greatly needed to sell the concepts of the series, ie, how augmentation can change the self-hood we experience in relation to our bodies and consciousness. The Major is subversive in appearance and proclivities (scantily clad, domineering, bisexual in the manga and SAC) to the point of being intimidating in modern contexts, and this quickly sells us on the reality of the universe she inhabits with its changing values, moral codes, and opportunities. She's a fluid character in a fluid environment; in every iteration she's shown to fluctuate between loyalty to external forces and roguish self-actualization at the expense of others. In short, she's a great example of a strong female character precisely because she's so much more than just a strong female: she's unpredictable.

And so it's a great pain to see her reduced to a hetero-normative cliche romance where she defers completely to a one-note, flat-out Bishounen who predictably betrays her. It's conceptually flawed, but the script is even worse: imagine if Ripley from Alien(s) was inserted into Bella's place in any given Twilight scene, and you'd essentially have every romance scene in Ghost Tears.

I understand that a prequel requires showing us characters when they weren't yet themselves, when they were foolish and idealistic and more vulnerable than we're used to seeing them. But the problem is we've already seen this delicate spin on the Major in 2nd Gig, and the Kuze romance had substance, mostly because the related plot-line developed the Major in a significant way; the Ghost Tears romance develops young Motoko insomuch as she has a teen girl epiphany that love can be specious. The only signs of the old Major come in short bursts whenever someone pushes her over the edge, and in these misjudged scenes the Major is simplified to another extreme and becomes merely histrionic.

Hurting the integrity of an iconic character is enough to make Arise a botched effort but its other sins seem almost endless:

Flaw #2: The supporting cast becomes the ancillary cast.
I understand there's only so much you can do in 60 minutes, but aside from seeing Motoko become Motoko, the novelty of Arise is that you get to see Section 9's recruitment. Or at least that used to be the marketing ploy of the OVAs, now I'm not so sure. Each episode has just been a barrage of things happening which so happen to involve a future member of Section 9, so that after the climax we're treated to:

Motoko: Hey, want to be on my team?
Future member: Okay.

There's no grandeur to them joining, they don't even seem to play major roles in the proceedings deserving of their recruitment. Togusa was the addition to the team this time around but if you asked me what he did that so demanded his involvement I couldn't tell you, because I can't remember anything he did.

The characters being put into the periphery is more glaring in Ghost Tears because they're sidelined for the dull romance. But what really sets their writing apart as poor this time around is their reduction: the full extent of their presence in most scenes is the delivery of a signature character trait (e.g., Batou delivers sarcastic one-liners, Togusa mentions his Mateba, Paz talks about his relationship troubles). We've seen all this before, across two different installments of the franchise, and by this point the characters are just self-referents winking at the audience.

And the Logikoma got about one line. Why even add a moe-relief device to something with such a short run-time in the first place if you won't let them deliver?

Flaw #3: Production integrity.
The Oshii GITS films are some of the most beautiful traditional and digital animation, respectively, that you can ever hope to see. And although SAC had its problems (especially in the first season) with characters going off-model at inopportune times, the production integrity on an episode by episode basis was absolutely amazing for a 52-episode series. We don't get nearly the same level of craft in even 60 minutes of Arise, where characters go off-model so severely their heads seem to glide up and down on their necks like moeblob thermostats.

And it's not even a budgetary concern because you can tell the budget was enormous, it's the fact the designs aren't sustainable for anything other than static close-ups. Coming off the heels of SAC, which had some of the best character designs in the franchise (and the industry as a whole), this is BS.

Flaw #4: Convoluted garbage.
It's a testament to what little I have to say about the plot when it's almost the last thing I address. I can't begin to tell you the specifics of anything that happened except for the various lazy twists slinged out toward the end that render your attention up to that point a wasted effort, because none of the specifics really amount to anything. So it's a good thing I barely paid attention. And this is not for lack of trying: the script is at ends with itself. It has no clue how to communicate to an audience visually or textually.

The majority of scenes are people sitting around and talking - and this is somewhat of a staple in the franchise. GITS involves heavy exposition that mixes a lot of lingo and jargon together: corporate, philosophical, bureaucratic, political, technological, legal. The structure of SAC is usually a dense briefing followed by the actual meat of the episode, so if you phase out during these expository sequences you're screwed. But SAC and the films isolate these expository sequences between actual plot development, and they employ a lot of visual staging to guide your attention throughout. Ghost Tears is almost entirely exposition. There is no pacing, there are no deftly wrought symbols, there are no beautifully rendered settings, there is little to no actual directing involved. People talk, and they talk a lot, and they talk about things yet to be given a visual referent.

Nothing that occurs outside of talking adds emphasis to the plot threads, because anything that isn't talking is mindless and random action sequences so wholly removed from relevance that they don't even feature human characterization. In one scene an innocent worker discovers he has a sort of explosive inside his prosthetic arms, and so to save everyone else from the impact Sec. 9 throws this dude's entire body down an elevator shaft with no remorse, no comment, no beat at all aside from complaining about the smoke. This could be intentional, but I can't imagine what the writers thought they were accomplishing: if the characters aren't involved in their surroundings to the point of having logical thoughts or feelings of accountability, why should I care about what's going on? It becomes a mere series of events. SAC and the films have characters doing what they do because of grounded motivations, and if they ever come to the point of allowing casualties for the greater good they have internal and external conflicts. So there's mindless violence on one end and needlessly dense exposition on the other end with no balance involved. I'm left feeling like no single scene has impact on the other.

There's nothing cohesive about the nuts and bolts of the script but there's also nothing cohesive about the themes underneath. Motoko yearns to feel human so she has romantic relations. Cool, but we've seen this before and it's unrealistic to believe that anyone (but especially Motoko) would feel more human when engaging a partner so inhuman and boring. Other themes involve the difference between bodies and objects, losing track of identity when your body is switchable, etc., all cool, all done before in the franchise, all irrelevant to the actual plot of the OVA.

I haven't even mentioned what the plot is. So what is the main plot? Something about water corporations. Riveting. Granted, the seedy underbelly of ostensibly benign corporations is an interesting concept, but the script doesn't allow you to consider this because it's handled with no mystery - a character appears on-screen and says I Work for Water. It's a shame the writing team didn't think to utilize this aspect of their script, just as they didn't think to utilize any other aspect of their script.

Final flaw: the Kaworu dynamic.
And we come full circle with the romantic interest. I can't remember what his name was so I'll refer to him as Kaworu, because that's essentially who he is, and his dynamic makes much less sense when not paired with a weak-willed character like Shinji, and instead with the diametrically hyper-willed Motoko. The chemistry with Kaworu makes no sense, and this is most evident in how Motoko is written as a completely different character in all of their Attack of the Clones-esque gallivanting.

The conflict between the Major's sense of duty and sense of self can be easily grafted onto a romantic situation and, as I've said before, already was in 2nd Gig to much greater effects precisely because it involved tragedy and schism. In Ghost Tears there is no conflict: the Major becomes weak willed and seems comfortable staying there until the story pulls her back out.

Bonus flaw: the soundtrack.
It sounded like Playstation-era shovelware techno BG music and the ending song with Sean Lennon (???) was the aural equivalent of dumping a tanker-truck of sand onto a gaping flesh wound.

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It's ironic that a major visual theme (pretty much just an aesthetic choice with no depth at all) is water and water-related things, because this is essentially a watered down and pointless version of the franchise. Absolutely avoid it at all costs unless you enjoy watching stillbirths.