The End, Again. Seriously this time. Third time’s the charm?
14 years for 4 movies to rebuild Evangelion:
- 1.0 You Are (Not) Alone. (2007)
- 2.0 You Can (Not) Advance. (2009)
- 3.0 You Can (Not) Redo. (2012)
- 3.0+1.0 Thrice Upon a Time (2021)
During this time we’ve had the MCU release 24 movies, DCEU release 10 movies. Was it worth waiting for 3+1?
Yes.
Some questions were answered, some weren’t. Extra-terrestrial entities were mentioned again, briefly without resolution. An anti-universe is explored but not explained. I’m fine with that, it’d take an hour to explain that.
For those that don’t read the manga, this is a variation of that Ending presented without a certain viewpoint. Amazing visuals, cheesy soundtrack. Hybrid cel painting/CGI work again, and THIS time, real-world visuals intertwined with CGI. Leading to spoilers.
Spoilers. Psychologically: Shinji = Gendo = Kaworu. Asuka, Mari, Ayanami and Shinji are all clones reformed from LCL post movie 2. Mari was Yui’s lab assistant, like Asuka (and now Shinji post movie 3) she’s an adult in a child’s body, and is also in love with Shinji. ̶S̶e̶e̶m̶s̶ ̶l̶i̶k̶e̶ ̶A̶s̶u̶k̶a̶’̶s̶ ̶p̶e̶r̶s̶o̶n̶a̶l̶i̶t̶y̶ ̶m̶e̶r̶g̶e̶d̶ ̶w̶i̶t̶h̶ ̶M̶a̶r̶i̶’̶s̶ ̶p̶o̶s̶t̶ ̶i̶n̶s̶t̶r̶u̶m̶e̶n̶t̶a̶l̶i̶t̶y̶. I got corrected by reddit user Arxis_Two, Asuka is alone on the train platform on the curtain call. They both are in “like” with Shinji. Post-instrumentality is … our reality. As the closing shot of Hachioji? (not sure the city) on a drone illustrates. NOTE THE IMAGE USED FOR THIS REVIEW? IT IS PERHAPS THE BIGGEST SPOILER. NO BETTER USE FOR “A picture is worth a thousand words”.
Neon Genesis was left out of the remake movie titles specifically to say as a viewer that you could interpret this as occurring either before or after the anime series (infinite loop). Nice twist.
I really don’t know why this took 11 years to complete though. During that time, a full remake SERIES could have been greenlit by Netflix and presented to leave zero doubts for fans of the series. Alas, as with Avengers: Endgame, we have an ending that leaves you bittersweet.
Viewed August 13, 2021 via Amazon Prime.
