Review of Evangelion: 3.0 You Can (Not) Redo

Imagine a world of Asuka’s. Where she rules and is the boss and stupid Shinji is there. This is what I thought of when I saw that there was an Evangelion reboot, then was surprised when I saw the first two actually rebuilding the series and branching out. However this doesn’t even focus on Asuka (which might’ve made the movie 10x better if I’m honest) it still focuses on Shinji which I’ll get to why that’s a bad thing in a minute. The music is pretty good, another 9. The art is the same and part of what I actually like about this movie, Asuka's suit looksbetter than the last one, some of the 3D elements felt really cool, I'll leave it as a 9 as I rated the others.

Characters. Here's where things start to dip. I'm going to give it a 6, as well as its story. What if Shinji wasn’t needed to pilot the EVA? Curious but doesn’t that idea break the game? Well he suffers from boredom and introduces the main theme and lesson of this movie as “change”. I could see that being a statement since it’s a reboot and I welcome change but this just doesn’t do anything with it. In a way it’s a double standard because Kaworu keeps saying to accept it and to repeat the same notes until it feels good but at the same time he’s like “the same thing won’t do anything” “let’s go reboot the planet the way it was”, basically whatever Shinji wants to hear at the time and in a way, it’s reflective, he’s acting as temptation. The truth weakened Shinji and Kaworu was there when nobody else was. Then it seems kind of mucked up by the 3rd quarter because they throw it out the window and Shinji is a little dweeb used for plot convenience, I asked myself "Why?" Shinji's decisions don't make much sense at that point, everything before that point (and you'll know if you see it) can be attributed to trauma and as I mentioned, Kaworu.

I'm not sure if he's meant to be evil in this version or not, I mean the ending doesn't say a whole lot about his character type. Mari predicted the Hit or Miss girl, wearing pink and white, taunting with “I never miss” but she's just that, there's no depth to her character.

This also might be the biggest example of keeping the main character out of the loop and unfortunately that also means the viewer (at times). To quote: 1:34:55 - “I don’t understand what you’re telling me. I DON’T UNDERSTAND!”

Asuka is cool and that's about it for characters, everybody else changed into something I'm not all that big of a fan of, wasn't there or is a new character (which means barely anything is known about them)

The thing that surprised me is that it panders, it’s...slow. With the fast pacing of the last 2 movies, I’m very surprised, if you thought there was too much action in the last two, look no further because there are very few scenes (however that opening scene took about 1/4 of the movie). And I’m not someone who needs “pretty lights and colors and explosions” to keep me entertained (says the guy obsessed with Tron) I like to think I have pretty decent standards.

During the last movie, my jaw dropped at the final set piece. This movie, I couldn’t wait for it to be over. I was relieved to see that last minute or so. It just doesn't live up to anything Evangelion has done thus far and while it adds new characters and skips a whopping amount of time after the last one, it feels stale because the only reason I could see to do that was just a cheap method to change everything to set the stage for this final movie, by all means, let it prove me wrong; The plot just doesn't seem relevant enough to grant it a movie, it's not good alone and it's not good as a companion piece, you could've just said that what happened at the end of the last movie caused everything about to come, not try to up the anty because it's not exciting anymore, it's like biting off more than you can chew.

MAL's rating system says 6 is "fine" but this is not fine, I just don't think it's as bad as some of the other stuff I've rated.