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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.