Review of Neon Genesis Evangelion

When it comes down to it there's two ways to look at a show or film like this, as a piece of expressive art, and as a narrative story. Let's tackle the story first. It's a mess. The first half feels like an above average but still fairly standard mecha, just with far more substance to it when compared to something like Gurren Lagann. The latter half drops a lot of plot focus and hones in on its characters, going so far as to completely drop the plot all together and spend the last two episodes doing nothing but psychoanalyze them. Now, I'm a very charactersbefore plot kinda guy, I don't really care how weak or cliche or uninteresting on the surface a story's plot is, so long as the characters are compelling to me. That said, the plot plays in important role in making the characters feel compelling to me. It gives them a sense of place and time, something that when missing makes any character progression or growth feel incredibly disconnected and hollow, because it doesn't feel like it actually happened. Because of that, despite the conclusion to Shinji's arc in the final episode being good on paper, it just doesn't work for me because of how abstract it is, there's no sense of place or time, so for all I know Shinji himself isn't even real, let alone the emotional journey he just went through.
The most important part here is that it doesn't really work for *me*. These kinds of things are subjective, and there are a great many people out there that get way more than me out of this kind of storytelling. For me personally though: I do like a bit of ambiguity in my stories, however I prefer the things that are ambiguous to be stuff like aspects of the world's lore, character motivations, etc, not the series of events the story takes place in. I just don't really connect with a story when I can't figure out what the heck is happening in the sequence of events. That kind of thing works for some people, but personally I just find that it distracts me from the characters and thematic ideas, which is the stuff I care about most in a story.
All this to say, the story in this show feels like a mess, it took a bit to really grab me, and it completely lost it's marbles at the end. However the majority of the middle chunk of show is really good. There's some awkwardly handled scenes and ideas, some stuff I don't really like, but as a whole it tackles a lot of thematic ideas and emotional beats in a way that really worked for me. That's why the end disappointed me, it took its character focus so far that it completely removed it from a context that allowed me to connect with it, it just became something that isn't for me. This is of course entirely down to a personal level, so your millage as to the story as a whole will probably differ drastically from mine

That's just as a work of narrative fiction however, regarding how I stand on it as a piece of expression and art, it is incredibly high quality. A lot of the things that I take personal issue with narratively aren't mistakes or issues at all, they were conscious creative decisions made by the director to make what he wanted to make. And judging by the (very minimal) research I've done, this show is an incredibly personal piece of art. Anno poured so much of himself into this project, and it really shows. It's not so much a sci-fi mecha as it is a deep dive into this man's mental and emotional issues, all expressed in such a poignant way that really anyone that's experienced a similar feeling to any of the ones expressed here can feel a true sense of connection with the show. The idea that only a depressed person can understand this show isn't exactly correct, but it isn't entirely wrong either. You don't need to be depressed to understand it, but anyone who has dealt with some form of depression, even if it was pretty minor, at some point in their life can feel a connection with the struggles the characters go through, and by extension, the struggles Anno was expressing through them.

It doesn't really work for me as a story, and in the end it's just not exactly for me. However it serves as an artful form of communication. Through watching you feel as though you're growing to understand something of what a fellow human being has, and will likely continue to go through, and by extension it can help you better understand your own emotions. After all, that kind of expression, communication and understanding is kind of what art as a whole is all about.
For me though, the particular method of communication this show uses doesn't really work as well as I'd like. That however does in no way invalidate it. There are tons of people out there that this kind of thing directly speaks to, and I'm happy for them, it just doesn't speak to me in the same way, though I can understand and appreciate why it does to them.