I'm one of those people who didn't like Evangelion: 3.33 that much (although I have the strong need to watch it in a new light), so I was a little anxious about how this final movie will fare. While I didn't love it like Evangelion: 2.0 (I'm one of those people) I liked it quite a lot. It has a good mix of good, wholesome, sad, frustrating moments that makes it hard to not like it. In many ways, it is a goodbye letter to the characters and for the series so it works both in plot context as well as meta context.
The flow of the movie is mixed though, the first half of the movie is the strongest one at least to me, we see our protagonists do stuff and develop their characters beautifully and sadly that keeps the progression of the story in a steady rhythm. The second part however is when things get a little rocky and in some parts make you think that a scene has been taken too much time, I'm talking about the action scenes. In the original anime, the action scenes were beautifully animated and choreographed, if an Eva connected a punch or fired a rifle you could feel the weight of them and each fight had the stakes up to the sky so it was easy to be fully engaged. The problem with this movie (and maybe with many of the fights of the Rebuild tetralogy) is that the fights didn't feel meaningful, in many of them we see our pilots shooting at enemies like it was a shooting gallery and every one of them dies with one bullet, so the danger is almost nonexistent, sum it up with serviceable but not great CG animation and you'll have a scene that will be (sad to say this) boring to watch. This pattern repeats in almost every fight so it really impacted my enjoyment of the movie.
Speaking of CG, I don't have a problem when they decide to use it but some scenes by the ending are tainted by an unrefined CGI that would be beautiful and memorable if they decided to do it in 2D (maybe) although it is a budget problem so I understand why they decided to go this route.
Evangelion has always been synonymous with religious and symbolic narrative with a lot of interpretation and that tradition still is true for this movie, it has a lot to chew on and what is so beautiful about it is that everybody will have an interpretation of it, for instance, after watching it, I was talking to a couple of friends and it was surprising how the three of us have a completely different interpretation of the ending and the fun part is that all of our theories could be the "real" ending, and that speaks a lot of the greatness of Evangelion.
The Rebuild tetralogy has been a polarizing series, it has very high and very low points through its entirety and they all are far from perfect (except for 2.0 lol) it somewhat shifted to a more spectacle route instead of a more introspecting one and that is OK, Thrice Upon a Time tried to do both and while it was a good choice the result was a mixed bag. All in all, even when there are things that I didn't prefer 3.0+1.0 was a satisfying sendoff to the tetralogy.
