bye-bye, all of EVANGELION

evangelion 3.0+1.11: thrice upon a time (hideaki anno, 2021)

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I had a sort of hope that in this post getting delayed by various events I would find myself forgetting my massive irritation from the previous Rebuilds and would be able to be fairer to whatever this movie is actually trying to do. We’ll never know if that would have happened, as this movie opens with a brief recap of the prior films, thus punting me straight back into “I can’t believe this shit” territory, mentally speaking. And there I mostly stayed.

Anyway.… It’s certainly the best Rebuild movie. I don’t want to set my Bluray on fire, which is good because that would probably be hard to do. I don’t even really mind owning it, as I like the art. But I’m just not into it. If I do what I need to do to enjoy it, which is detach it completely from the show, I’m left with a bunch of characters who look like people I care about but are not really them. Even though the expository dialogue is constant, I still never know what’s going on. The emotional threads that could guide you through both Evangelion and End of Evangelion aren’t really present here. It’s just stuff happening.

Thrice Upon a Time picks up where the last movie ended: Asuka, Shinji, and not-Rei wander around in the desolate landscape. Well, that’s not quite true. Actually it begins with a big action sequence set in Paris. I don’t actually think this sequence has a single reason to exist? They manage to restore some of Paris from the effects of the Third Impact, but then they just… leave? Paris never matters and the rest of the action of the movie takes place either in Antarctica or in the “anti-universe.” It also ends with Mari vowing to find Shinji no matter where he is, which is kind of silly because it will turn out everybody already knows where he is.¹

Anyway, our three pilots are taken to a village of survivors (which works with Misato’s organization, WILLE), and… suddenly they’re in a Ghibli movie? Like we’re out here farming the land and admiring cats and babies. Although thanks to events which nobody involved in this movie could anticipate, it now really looks more like a village that’s been run through that AI Ghibli filter.

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The sequence in the village is one of many which left me feeling that if the previous movies hadn’t left me in such a state of irritation, this might have worked. If I hadn’t sat through the second movie’s waifu contest, watching not-Rei make friends and learn things might have been moving, and the contrast between the art styles could have generated some interesting friction. Rei (and thus, not-Rei) is, after all, the least natural-looking character of the original cast, and she is also literally unnatural (being a clone), and now suddenly she’s in this agrarian village. That could be interesting.²

As it is, not-Rei makes friends and learns things, Asuka broods and plays her Gameboy, and Shinji broods for a genuinely unclear length of time (days? weeks?) before deciding to pitch in and help out. Adult Toji, married to Hikari, and adult Kensuke are here. One touch I did enjoy in this movie is that Kensuke being a weird survivalist freak who loves hardware actually ends up mattering, and Kensuke growing up into a fairly relaxed and live-and-let-live adult works as a way he could turn out. (Toji’s path to “village doctor” is a bit less believable.)

However, one day Asuka asks if not-Rei is doing all right, and then it turns out that she can’t survive outside of NERV and she explodes into LCL before Shinji’s eyes. He and Asuka reboard the Wunder and set off for the final battle at the South Pole. Except nobody wants Shinji to pilot so he’s just put in a sealed container. Asuka comes to say goodbye to him before the end and tells him that back in the day she had a crush on him, but now she’s grown up and he hasn’t.

Then she and Mari go off to fight. Through a Series of Events, Asuka decides she has to generate her own AT Field, and this requires her to activate the part of her that fused with the Angel back in the second movie. Unfortunately by doing so she merely falls into Gendo’s trap and is consumed.³ Gendo starts to end the world (again). Ritsuko shoots him but it turns out Gendo isn’t human anymore so it doesn’t matter. Shinji shows up to pilot and defeat his father and two girls show up to shoot him but they fail and instead shoot Misato. Anyway Shinji goes off into the anti-universe to fight his dad, but it turns out that this does not work. Instead he asks his dad to explain his damage basically so Gendo’s like… I was always a solitary child…

Meanwhile back in human world, they manufacture a spear so Shinji can defeat his dad. By the time they get it to him Shinji has already defeated his dad through the power of therapy, but he still needs the spear to reverse the damage. Misato dies delivering it to him, making her and Kaji the only people in this entire thing (I think?) who die for real. Anyway, Shinji goes and sees Asuka about her damage, and then he goes and sees Kaworu, and then Rei.⁴ Then he rewrites the world so that Evas don’t exist and sits down in the anti-universe to wait for Mari to rescue him.⁵ She does. Then adult Shinji and adult Mari, who are I guess a couple now, run off into the real world. The end.

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I imagine that there wouldn’t really be a way to fund the following version of a new Evangelion movie, but when I was watching the part in the village, my feeling was: if there’s this level of unfinished business for Anno and whoever else, it would have been better simply to start a movie where End of Evangelion stops. Since the suggestion in End of Evangelion is that anybody can reconstitute themselves out of the primordial sea if they have the will to do so, people would have always been reappearing to find their one time peers older and adjusted to a radically new world. And in that world, Shinji and Asuka, as the first to emerge, would have to be the adults.

It’s not that I really want to watch that movie—I don’t—but that I would have understood it as adding something genuinely new. It might have been something new (and terrible), but I would have thought: this is doing something that hadn’t been done, it is asking new questions, it is trying something. You could still have had these stories of rebuilding civilization out of the wreck, the guilt and anger, all the rest of it.

This thought recurred at the movie’s actual ending, which I felt could have worked very well if anything leading up to it had worked for me. In the Rebuild movies, Shinji is and is not responsible for being a necessary component of his father’s plan to end the world. He didn’t know what he was doing, and probably wouldn’t have done it if he’d known, but it still would not have happened without him. Certainly one route to seeing Shinji “grow up” would see him figuring out how to accept what he’s done and either truly relinquish his power or take it up with more understanding. Thrice Upon A Time gestures at this outcome in the scene where two different women both try to shoot Shinji to keep him from piloting again. This scene is dumb and not set up well.⁶ Still, it is maybe the best attempt throughout the movies to depict Shinji facing people’s hatred and understanding it without being overwhelmed by it.

But then of course he gets into the Eva, and after his family therapy session, the solution turns out to be to reset the world… again?⁷ The ending is Shinji basically literally creating the high school world of the TV ending, the one where nobody has to pilot. In the TV ending⁸ Shinji rejects rewriting the world and in End of Evangelion he eventually does. Here, however, he does rewrite the world. He closes all the storylines. He listens to his dad. He says goodbye to Asuka and Kaworu and Rei and releases them from their emotional entanglement with him.⁹

Gendo’s interminable speech about how he was always a loner feels genuinely insulting to my intelligence,¹⁰ but it also represents something that I don’t like about the way things are resolved here. Gendo being an embittered mess isn’t something Shinji can fix. Other people’s problems aren’t something Shinji can fix. He apologizes to Asuka for neither saving her nor killing her and views this as the result of his own weakness at the time. The message of the movie is that Shinji actually should simply accept he is responsible for everything that happens and never cry again, because that’s adulthood. Actually, that’s being Gendo.

What’s at stake in any of this? Why do Kaji and Misato both die for real, but Kaworu doesn’t? Why have two people threaten, essentially out of nowhere, to kill Shinji if he pilots again, show up and scream at him, try to shoot him, and then give up? When Asuka embraces the Angel aspect of herself and Mari is like “no! don’t! you’ll lose your humanity” I have no idea what that means. Weren’t we already told going “beast,” something Mari and Asuka have both done, meant losing your humanity? Is this… some extra special way of losing your humanity?¹¹ Gendo also throws away his humanity, but again, what does that even mean? What makes Mari’s quest to rescue Shinji from non-existence different from Gendo’s quest to be reunited with Yui? These questions pile up and up, and the movie simply has no interest in them because it is laser-focused on its single message of “you need to grow up.”

And if the message of these movies is “grow up, you can’t be fourteen forever”—why is everything magnitudes more cartoonish and juvenile than the show or End of Evangelion? Also, frankly… I didn’t need to be told this! I like being treated like an intelligent adult, something both the TV show and End of Evangelion always did. My experience of these movies was watching them get dumber and dumber until the very end, when Shinji looks directly at the camera and says to me, I bet you thought that was all pretty cool, but it’s actually bad. It’s bad to think this is cool. Great news, Shinji. I am way ahead of you there. I thought this was all stupid as hell. What’s my lesson?

So, yes, this project just doesn’t work for me. I hope Hideaki Anno got whatever he wanted out of doing this… but in my opinion, he should stick to Godzilla movies now.

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• The day I watched this my mother kept asking me “are you doing okay?” which I thought was because I was sleepy but maybe my fed up–ness had become one of those little personal rain clouds you see in cartoons.

• Who on earth are “the gods” constantly invoked in this movie? Where did they come from?

• It’s been clear since the third movie that Mari is of Gendo and Yui’s generation, because she’s in the picture Fuyutsuki has, and here she’s also in Gendo’s memories. There is no attempt to explain anything about this and Fuyutsuki then calls her “Mary Iscariot” and she’s like ah… I haven’t heard that name in years… but also it doesn’t matter. All of that could be removed. It makes zero difference.

• Misato almost pulling a Gendo on her own child… ma’am… also, when did she even get pregnant? And tell Kaji she was pregnant? When did anything happen?

• Kensuke seems to live in some alternate reality where because Toji and Hikari got together, Shinji can feel like some good things came out of almost ending the world, and also Shinji should try to patch stuff up with Gendo before it’s too late. I wrote this note down mid-movie but I guess the second of these actually happens. Things can always get dumber!

• There’s a level of “all according to plan” here for Gendo that becomes really absurd. Not-Rei dies in front of Shinji? Right on schedule…

• The running joke about Maya saying “this is the problem with young men” offended me partly because it’s annoying but also because surely (she says, voice of madness creeping in) the opportunity these movies present is one of developing the relationship between Maya and Ritsuko, not Maya and the concept of young men in general. I’m not saying they have to have gotten married and set up house together with a cat but like, you know. Why not. “They live on a battleship” is not, in the context of this movie, an acceptable answer.

• This is one of those things that makes me feel like some kind of “plot hole” YouTube channel but it’s established that the Wunder is also an ark full of all the animals that the Second Impact killed and that preserving the biodiversity of the Earth was Kaji’s goal. Then as things escalate, the people evacuate, and… Misato blows the ship up. So… uh… what happened to all them animals.

• Actually, of my many resentments, probably number one is that writing about these movies makes me feel like a YouTube “plot hole” person: Uhhhhhhhhhh this doesn’t make sense????? I’m going to hit myself in the face with a rock, brb.

• Kaji showing up in Kaworu’s emotional closure sequence felt like confirmation that he is the person who Kaworu is a clone of, yes? I mean that’s always been my assumption, because they look similar, but otherwise, why would he be there?

• I continue to feel like Gurren Lagann hangs over these movies in a weird way—Mari attacking an enemy with the Eiffel Tower, which turns into a spiral, didn’t exactly change that feeling.

• Neither did Asuka fighting a giant spiral of mass produced Eva units. With anime there’s always sort of a danger of seeing two points and forcing a line, so who knows. (I liked Gurren Lagann when it came out, though I haven’t rewatched it.)

• On that note, the fight scenes in this movie looked absolutely terrible to me, I have to say. In one case—Gendo and Shinji fighting in the world of Shinji’s memories—I would have thought that was on purpose, but since everything else also looked bad, I am forced to conclude no, it was not. I also found them very hard to follow, like just when it came to where people were, vis-a-vis each other.

• I actually like the bitter nerd persona they settled on for Asuka. She’s so antisocial she barely dresses in clothes outside her plugsuit and she just plays her Gameboy all the time. It is different from the show’s Asuka in a way that actually works, in part because it was sort of asking “what is the main memory people have of Asuka,” supplying “seething and angry,” and then building out a whole character around that.

• On the other hand, Asuka being a clone like Rei, the last survivor of a program that eliminated all the others, is an idea they just sort of… drop and then don’t do anything with. Every interesting idea in the Rebuild movies is basically shoved in at the last moment and then never touched again. One thought I had while editing this write-up is that maybe it should have been another TV show.

• Kaworu and Rei being paired off in the last scene felt sort of… not racist, wrong word, but it was like… “you two are both clones, right? you must have a lot in common.”

• It’s sort of a bummer to end things on this note, honestly. But the show is still great, and End of Evangelion I can respect even if I don’t love it.

• The next… series? season? of… (re)watching stuff…? will start October 3 with The Castle of Cagliostro. I should also have an actual list of what I’m doing by then.

1. Like a lot of things in this movie, this is put here to create resonance later, and like a lot of things in this movie, it does not work.

2. A mild complaint is that they really have no consistent way of establishing how much not-Rei knows. She doesn’t know what a cat is, she doesn’t know what a baby is, she seems to only grasp here the idea of “books,” but… she can also read a book to a child about a hedgehog, etc. Plenty of her lines are “funny” but they do not make sense.

3. In a movie full of “what?” dialogue, Misato says to Gendo “you’ll sacrifice Asuka for this?” and I almost wanted Gendo to respond “who’s Asuka?” Like oh the guy who elaborately tortured his own son on purpose, created hundreds of disposable clones of his wife, and is trying to end the world is going to say wow, you’re right, what a monster I’d be to sacrifice Asuka, a character with whom I have never shared a line of dialogue.

4. In his conversation with Kaworu it’s revealed that they’ve gotten to this point several times before. Did Shinji always defeat Gendo by listening to him? Did Misato always die? Inquiring minds etc.

5. This moment is, I should say since I’m being so snarky, genuinely visually inventive, where Shinji waits as he and the background slowly become sketchier and sketchier animation. In the last part of this movie there are a lot of touches like this, including Shinji and Asuka being animated like they are in a poster. I would have loved to see all this in a movie I actually liked.

6. In one case the woman in question basically announces, out of nowhere, that she has a grudge and will never forgive Shinji for what he did, which means you know exactly what she’s going to try to do ten minutes later.

7. The dialogue where Shinji explains what he’s doing to Kaworu is like:

Shinji: I’m not going to rewrite or reset the world again.

(Me: OK, good, yes.)

Shinji: I’m just going to rewrite it one last time.

(Me: …)

8. in my opinion

9. There’s a suggestion that Asuka and Rei, and possibly Kaworu (?), are all “programmed” to love Shinji or something, making this a little like those scenes where somebody says to their pet raccoon or something “you got to go in the woods! you cain’t live here! go on now! git!” Children’s media led me to believe that this would be something I would have to do in my life but much like getting marooned on an island it doesn’t seem to be going on for me.

10. When he said he always loved playing the piano, I actually said “what?” out loud.

11. Also, why does Asuka yell out an attack name while she’s doing this? (Why would there even be an attack name for doing this?) (And if Angels and people can’t co-exist, isn’t it ultimately more interesting that Asuka has achieved some kind of fusion within herself…?) (I can do this forever.)