Whatever you say Ritsuko. Does anything of significance even get accomplished over the course of EVANGELION 3.0 QUICKENING/YOU CAN (NOT) REDO (good lord!) that justifies itself in the grand scheme of the franchise? Not particularly. The movie ends the same way the last one did, without giving us much more insight in the process. Director Hideaki Anno's Rebuild series has been an interesting gamble. 1.0 and 2.0 are more or less an abridged retelling of NEON GENESIS's story up through Zeruel's devastating assault on the GeoFront. The ending of 2.0 came with the promise of exciting new horizons for this story and its character. It's uncharted territory from this point forward.
How disappointing it is that 3.0 immediately sucks the oxygen out of the room by bringing us back into the fold a baffling 14 years after the events of 2.0 rather than more urgently dealing with what happened. The state of everything is totally inexplicable. A comatose Shinji and Unit-01 have been locked inside Dali's Corpus Hybercubus, floating in orbit for this entire period and unaware of anything that has transpired. Once freed from the tesseract, he learns that the "near" Third Impact (near enough for everyone to have the Fourth Impact marked down on their proverbial calendars) he inadvertently caused has virtually destroyed the world... again. In this post-post-apocalypse, the entire NERV crew sans Gendo and Fuyutsuki are in open rebellion against their former employer under the banner of WILLE. Neither the reasons for this dissent nor the logistics of how just two people could continue running an organization like NERV are ever explained. We are just supposed to go with it. Despite the passage of time, Asuka and Mari haven't aged a day. Again, this is hand-waved away. Oh, and everyone hates Shinji.
For these reasons, the opening act of 3.0 is disorientating and bizarre. Shinji would seem to be an appropriate audience surrogate in these moments, but no one is willing to talk to him or explain damn-near anything. Anno is much more interested in a quick succession of action scenes against drones than providing any meaningful context to what's going on. Thankfully, the quieter second act is much stronger. Shinji's and Kaworu's yaoi relationship provides some emotional anchoring to the proceedings. This was ground covered by the original series, but is wonderfully realized here. Anno's knack for artful visual repetition (second only to his skill of showing laser beams cleave high-rises in two) is also strong during this stretch of the film.
Unfortunately, the rest of the cast is completely left by the wayside. Rei's reset button has been hit. Gendo speaks all of three sentences to his son. We get no insight into Asuka or Misato. Ritsuko is but a background figure. Ryoji is M.I.A. Mari is just... there, epitomizing of all the ways in which the Rebuild series will likely fail to pay dividends on its new additions. This is understandably Shinji's story, but the strength of EVANGELION is in its full cast of psychologically complex characters. To see them relegated to such tertiary roles is wasteful.
The action scenes are spectacular and dumb in equal parts. The trifecta of Anno, Maeda, and Tsurumaki give us beautifully animated scenes of utter chaos with the help of some CG. But none of it is grounded enough to have the same impact as the franchise's previous iconic battles. I'm never exactly sure what it is I am looking at or what's happening. I mean, there's a flying battleship that rams into a robot as it ascends to godhood in the midst of a cosmic maelstrom. Moments like these are just barely saved from the claws of hilarity. The sound work is fantastic, with the mechanical clangs of machines and alien sounds of laser beams being crisp as ever. And Shirō Sagisu provides mostly new material for the OST that is sure to get your blood pumping.
3.0 brings the Rebuild series to its knees instead of making good on the forward momentum it had going in. It mostly raises new questions rather than building on old ones and then proceeds to largely not answer them. Did Anno really go into this Rebuild series with a new story he was inspired to tell? Or is he just a perfectionist in the vein of George Lucas, forever tinkering with his magnum opus, obsessively adding in more halos, rainbows, and cross-shaped energy beams wherever he can? I don't know. What I can be sure of is, no matter how awesome 3.0+1.0 (ugh) might be, it will never fully realize the potential of the Rebuild series. But for whatever it's worth to you, this is still unmistakably EVANGELION.
