ChuckJorris Watching this movie was a pretty surreal and irritating experience. After watching the first 15 to 20 min of this highly expected movie I thought for some time that maybe I was watching the wrong movie or that I accidentally missed Evangelion 2.5. Sadly I found out, that there was no Evangelion 2.5 and this was actually the sequel to the amazing movies Evangelion 1.0 and 2.0, the movie i was anticipating with great expectations for years. I have watched the original series and loved it as much as the first two Rebuild-movies, though at the end I was a little bit disappointed, because the last episodes of the original series created a lot of new questions and didn´t provide much answers to bring the plot to a satisfying ending. Unfortunately Evangelion 3.0 and the last movie may have the same issues.After I had mentally coped with Evangelion 3.0 the experience reminded me of my disbelief, anger and disappointment after I had watched Matrix Revolutions or the last season of Lost. The experience of watching those examples can be compared to a punch in the face: Your eyes tear, you are disoriented for some time and after the punch you either get very angry or start to cry.This movie intentionally destroys all expectations you might have after the first two Rebuild-movies. Neo Tokyo 3 is destroyed, the world is destroyed, everybody hates Shinji, who accidentally caused the 3rd Impact. Shinji continues to work with his father and a braindead Rei-Clone against Misato and the others, though Commander Ikari seems to be the real villain, who for some reason planned the destruction of the world with the 3rd Impact to fulfill some sort of prophecy. Shinji plays a lot of piano with the new character Kaworu, who seems to be a clone of Shinji or Ikari just like Rei is a clone of Shinjis mother. The incoherent plot and the imagery are absolutely surreal and like Shinji you are constantly confused and have no clue, what is happening in this movie.I cannot rate this movie 1/10 because the artwork and the battle at the end are great and simply because I love NGE and the first movies too much.BUT PLEASE, HIDEAKI ANNO, DON'T PUNCH US FANS IN THE FACE AGAIN WITH THE NEXT MOVIE

Ucare I did not watch the original 26 episodes series but I watched in these days all Evangelion films, because of the high ratings: Death and Rebirth (a recompilation of the original series), The End (a rewriting of the End of the series, still considered one of the best Anime ever), and then the last three, 1 and 2 which reboot the series apparently without mayor changes, and 3 which goes in new territories.At first I will write about Evangelion in general, and then about this specific movie here. In all Evangelion the writer touched any possible demagogic stereotype and cliché on earth: father/son relationship, Oedipus complex, a bit of the typical Manga Style sexuality, cheap psychology, and a huge amount of very cheap esoterism with symbolisms of all kind. My opinion? A big omelet of everything, which finally means absolutely nothing. Wiki says that after the failure of his previous works (which he judged as childish) he wanted to make something "deeper". My impression is that he did not even try to BE deeper, rather just to SEEM deeper in order to impress the audience. And I am afraid that only the Naive could be impressed by such a confused mess.I can still see why this show had success: Evas are cool, fights too, and there is enough mix of drama, action, teenage nerd sexuality in the typical Japanese style, and some sort of epic. I suppose that if you are younger than me and without any knowledge of psychology or esoterism, and a bit nerd, you may enjoy this works pretty much more than I did.About this last Evangelion 3: it changes lot of things of what he had done before. In my opinion it is more complicated and meaningless than ever. Animations are good, story a mess. I cannot believe that this is the result of so much time and work. I think he just got lost in his omelet of cheap esoterism and cannot end Evangelion well because all what he wrote has got no meaning, so he cannot end it in a meaningful way. It leaks from all points. After this one, I hope that there will never be a 4 movie.

red_apals "Evangelion 3.0", or as I prefer to refer to it "Evangelion Q" is, in my opinion, the brightest piece in the revival movie series so far; it doesn't just replicate the script of the original series with updated visuals like its predecessors, but strives to create a soul for itself and carve a new path for the series as a whole.From the first view it is easy to see that Q wasn't tailored for neither the casual viewers nor the die hard fans, no, it was made with a way more specific yet elusive audience in mind, that is, the intelligent crowd.Q is, at its core, purely an exposition film much like 1.0; and whoever dwells in whatever events the film shows is a complete moron because that is clearly not the focus, the purpose of the film is to set up the rules of this new universe. What Q does differently from its earlier predecessor is that while 1.0 was easy on the viewer and evoked a sense of security, Q's objective is to shift the paradigm as aggressively as possible, to feel alien and uninviting.And why should it be any different? At this point we're in a world torn by a Third Impact, failed Instrumentality and fourteen years of war, like Shinji, we're not supposed to feel welcome, everybody knows more than they let on, but the time skip gives the movie a reason not to disclose this new logos.Exposition is a tricky thing to do, if you say too much without a reason you bore your audience, Q understands this; it shows instead of telling, it doesn't have Asuka or Misato talk around for hours about what transpired in those 14 years because they don't need to, they both already know it, so discussing it would be forced.Q is careful enough to show us a lot, but give us very little context, its daring new direction will insult the dimwitted, but will pique the interest of those who understand what Anno is trying to do here.

tinulthin The first two "rebuilds" of Evangelion crammed twenty episodes of the 1995 Shin Seiki Evangelion TV series into a span of three and a half hours, upping the musical and animation ante every explosive step of the way. Three years later, Evangelion 3.0 showed such promise: A teaser trailer so confident that it revealed only the internal workings of a piano; previews of an eyepatched Asuka spiraling through space with a shield and massive rifle to soul-rousing operatic strains. Yet after all the fervent build-up, Eva 3.0 feels like one of those reboots where a project was taken over by people who never understood why the franchise had rabid fans in the first place. Creator Hideaki Anno is still at the helm—and even back in the director's chair—yet when the film is over, the subtitle "You Can (Not) Redo" feels, more than anything, like an apology.Anno opens with Asuka and Mari deploying multi-stage booster rockets, high-powered sniper rifles, massive shields and a brand-new pink Eva to fight off an Angel while retrieving Shinji and Unit 01 from Earth orbit. The sequence is brilliant, operatic, even tear-inducing: Then Shinji wakes up in yet another intensive care unit and the roller-coaster ride crashes straight into a ditch from which it will never emerge.In 1997's the End of Evangelion, Shinji was offered a world in which he could merge with all of humanity so that he would never again have to feel alone. In Eva 3.0, he is offered a different world—one in which no demands are made of him at all. Enter ninety minutes of nothing.This is not like what Anno did when he ran out of budget for the animated series, when he drove fans berserk by throwing out all the robot rumbles to dive into the characters' psyches for the last two episodes. Eva 1995 was all about the characters, putting broken human beings in a world-on-the-brink environment with the idea that their most intense struggles would still be to be loved, cherished, and accepted for who they were. Eva 3.0 strips away both the characters and the environmental crucible, even eliminating the deeper question of why everything is happening, and leaves us only with the hum-drum intellectual exercise of finding out what happened.Shinji awakes into what is essentially the set of Das Boot melded with the bridge of the Macross. Misato is captain of a giant whale-like flying ark called the Wunder, the Nerv command crew man her bridge, and the cast is rounded out by a trio of space opera stock characters who get more lines than all the old cast combined. Even Mari, who had 'dark impending purpose' written all over her introduction in Eva 2.0, turns out to be nothing more than Asuka's sharp-shooting, one-liner-dropping sidekick. And despite the Third Impact having begun just to save her, when we finally meet Rei, she has no memory of the event and no connection to Shinji—or anyone else—whatsoever.It turns out that the Third Impact was aborted part-way, and Shinji has been fitted with a Battle Royale-style choker designed to pop off his head if he shows any sign of becoming a deity again. While for a time it seems that we have been immersed in an alternate-universe Eva redesigned as a space opera, it is actually fourteen years later, and all the character dynamics that brought fans to the series have withered and died away. Rei, Asuka and Misato speak so little it's as if they aren't even there, and even Shinji doesn't wallow in self-pity; he is confused by all the changes, but with all the characters so different, the emotional boil we would normally expect to see at this stage of the series simply cannot emerge.Having achieved friendship and affection in Eva 2.0, Shinji is much better adjusted than in his television iteration, and when he is whisked away from the Wunder to meet Kaworu, he's not desperate for approval—he just wants to know what's going on. Separated from all the people who cared about him, Shinji wanders through the hollowed-out remains of Nerv headquarters playing piano with Kaworu, stacking books for Rei and playing shogi with Fuyutsuki. And if that sounds about as exciting as a lazy Sunday afternoon, then you can imagine just how agonizing the middle hour of the movie becomes. By the time Kaworu outlines what Shinji could do to fix the world, there's just no reason to care. While there's an attempt to create drama over whether Kaworu's late-emerging MacGuffin will actually bring a 'fix' or the Fourth Impact doesn't really matter—from the audience's perspective, either change would be welcome. Even Ode to Joy can do nothing to elevate an Eva-on-Eva battle when there's no longer anything significant at stake.Aside from the opening, the most exciting part of Rebuild of Evangelion 3.0: You Can (Not) Redo may be the pre-film. In what is perhaps a dark parody of Pixar, the movie begins with a short film by Studio Ghibli showing the arrival of Nausicaa's God Warriors in Tokyo. Although inexplicably completed using people tromping around a miniature city in creepy God Warrior suits, the piece, narrated by the voice of Ayanami Rei (Megumi Hayashibara), is unusually grim and captivating.