Review of Evangelion: 3.0 You Can (Not) Redo

Evangelion 3.0 is basically "Evangelion 2.0 2.0: The Nonsense and Disillusionment Continues." I don't know what generically bad anime trope the movie attempts to implement at the beginning, but it's cringy. Shinji wakes up with amnesia, Asuka has an eye patch for no reason, Rei is more lifeless than ever, and Misato is needlessly angry. All the characters are effectively murdered. Let me put it this way. Kaworu was the character from the series with the least exposition and camera time. He's pretty much the main character of this movie, and he's still WORSE here. It takes effort to be this bad. The plot: Evangelion3.0 attempts to present itself as overly complicated, but tries too hard to be so. It's visibly an abomination of storytelling. They throw useless nomenclature at us that was previously done or mentioned subtly. They directly discuss things that didn't need to be discussed, as if naively trying to be something it's not. It's like that annoying kid in class that's always raising his hand and giving stupidly complicated answers just to show off that he's smart. Except Evangelion 3.0 is not smart. It spends most of its time doing this awkward world-building, just to end it with the most shameless Deus Ex Machina crap I've seen. It's truly infuriating how much this defames the Evangelion franchise.

So how can I say all these bad things about it, and still give it a 'Decent' score? The honest answer is that it's not that bad. It's just that bad in comparison to the Evangelion series. In a vacuum, it's still better than Gurren Lagann. As badly as the plot is executed, it still has more substance than most other anime I've seen. It's pretty. The musical score and voice acting are done well. It's just impossible to enjoy because of how terribly the characters are portrayed in comparison to their series' counterpart.

I would not recommend this to anyone that has seen the series or the first movie.