Review of Neon Genesis Evangelion

Asking me, or anyone for that matter, to rate Evangelion is criminal. If you were to ask me, this anime can go anywhere from a 4 to a 10, the story is generic, the characters are boring and even the mystery behind the evas is not that good, but behind a mediocre piece of storytelling is a pretty interesting general retrospective on humanity, as the pile of data we are relative to the universe and as the sum of the bonds we ahve with other people. It doesn't make sense? Fair, it is pretty difficult to make it make sense without throwing a generic "gowatch the damn anime".

Now, onto the breakdown. Evangelion can pretty easily be broken into 3 parts. First, and longest, taking a solid half of the anime. This part is the narrative one, I don't need to remake the synopsis but words need to be added to this pointless piece of data so here goes. Evangelion follows a boy named Shinji in the weakest excuse for alternate history where everything's fucked and humanity is doing its best to unfuck it. What is fucked? Well, something about massive creatures wreeaking havoc for no well defined reasons. Except they stopped, but now they continued. Why, you may ask? I dunno. Well, lucky them, Shinji just happened to be one of the roughly dozen of people capable of stopping the Angels. Why are they named Angels you may ask? I dunno. Basically, Shinji, and some other people have to stop them by driving giant robots that can stop them, courtesy of a secret branch of the UN. This part of the story is a travesty, in no universe is the UN good at anything.

And then the second half starts, and the giant robots battling being beyond human comprehension sidesteps and instead we are thrown into a mix of political and character drama. This shit was boring, because this part is kind of the part where they build characters, but also the part where the struggles start, all you're watching is a bunch of people you couldn't care less about vomit their life stories to each other and hoping that maybe you will shed a tear somewhere along the line. Needless to say, this failed, but maybe you're into drama so forced it makes Bollywood oscar worthy. As for the politics? Well, I understood something was going on, but I didn't get what and when I wanted to figure out the factions' next move, which is all the fun in such stories, all of a sudden, some bullshit is thrown and I'm left just losing interest because there's no way you can predict some of the spoiler worthy stuff I would talk about if I didn't make the review to convince people to watch this anime.

And then, something builds up in the 5 last episodes. The story's gone, the only thing remaining of the characters is their appearance and the fact they existed in the rest of the anime, the worldbuilding may as well have never existed and the visuals turn into something you'd find in a 19th century french arthouse movie, in layman's term, avant garde. At this point, the anime is talking to you, the viewer, sending a message that some of you may not identify with, but that I sure did, and that the majority of the anime community I know would relate at least somewhat to. I'm honestly still trying to digest that part so I'm not fully sure how, or even if I could explain it to you, but what I can say is that it brought an interesting perspective on things that plagued me as a human, especially the last episode, which on its own, would probably be a 10/10.

What I'm trying to say in one sentence, is that Evangelion, as a story is mediocre, but Evangelion, as a piece of media, has qualities we may as well never see in any othere such pieces. It's not the best show ever by a long shot, but if there's anything that I would consider a must watch, for anyone ever, Evangelion would be it. I'm not looking forward to End of Eva, the supposed sequel to this anime, because I just know this will be a poor attempt at ending the narrative aspect, but this isn't what this anime was made for, and to me, Evangelion already has the perfect ending.