nothing good ever comes from piloting
evangelion 3.33: you can (not) redo (hideaki anno, 2012)
Fourteen years after Shinji almost ends the world, Asuka retrieves Unit 01 from space. Shinji has been asleep or in a coma or something up there the whole time, and when he awakens he is understandably confused and not even aware of the passage of time. Misato is there but she won’t explain anything to him. A battle starts but they don’t want him to pilot. “Don’t get in the robot, Shinji”—is this reverse psychology? No, they actually mean it. But why?
It takes a while for anybody even to mention to Shinji that it’s been fourteen years, a statement he finds confusing given that Asuka is right there and she’s clearly not older. Asuka says that’s because of “the curse of the Evas,” something neither she nor anybody else wants to explain. In any case, Shinji is a prisoner now, not a friend, and Misato’s attached a bomb to his neck that she’ll detonate if he ever tries to pilot an Eva again or if Unit 01 activates again.
Shinji is also told Rei Ayanami is gone, but if Rei is gone, who’s this Rei psychically speaking to him…? Rei, or at least an Evangelion with Rei’s voice, retrieves Shinji from Misato’s ship, which is also the moment he discovers that Misato and Ritsuko and the rest are part of a new organization, WILLE, which fights against NERV.
Once Shinji arrives at NERV HQ, he’s told he’s eventually supposed to pilot again with a new Eva pilot, a white-haired boy we already know is Kaworu Nagisa but who takes his sweet time introducing himself. Shinji also tries to bond with Rei at NERV, but she seems blankly unable to engage with him, as if she has no memories, or is even a different person altogether. Luckily, there’s Kaworu, with whom he plays piano duets and falls in love or something. Kaworu also removes Shinji’s bomb collar and then, for reasons I couldn’t really explain to you, puts it on his own neck instead of putting it aside. It does not even make sense as a gesture to win Shinji’s trust. But I’m getting ahead of myself here. Kaworu also finally explains to Shinji that he caused the Third Impact and that’s why everybody hates him now. But they’re going to undo the Third Impact by doing this thing that Gendo wants them to do,1 because if there’s one person you can trust not to try to destroy the world, it is Gendo Ikari.
Unfortunately, Gendo lied to them about what he was actually trying to do. ): He’s actually going to end the world. ): Kaworu figures this out after he and Shinji get in their double-piloted Eva unit, but he does not really communicate the fact that he figured this out (see below), which means Shinji once again causes the end of the world. Kaworu stops the world from ending in part by blowing his own head off. At the end of the movie, Shinji, Asuka, and the latest Rei are all stranded on the surface of the Earth.
Here’s how I feel like every single Rebuild installment from me reads:
And I feel that way because… it’s true. That is how all of these read.
But my real problem with this movie is not that it’s different from the show, by which I mean, tonally different, or different in terms of events. I felt sort of able to regard this movie as something along the lines of official fan fiction. Like “I read this great fan fiction that imagined all the people I liked at NERV split off into some cool new thing that is not trying to end the world… and there was a hot new pilot in it who wore glasses, like me.… etc. No, it doesn’t have the emotional sophistication of the show, but it’s fun.” Anyway, my problem with Evangelion 3.33 is not that it’s different from the show in terms of the plot. My problem is that everybody in it acts like an idiot.
Like, OK. It’s been fourteen years. Shinji wakes up in a ship piloted by Misato, who will not speak to him or even really look at him. He doesn’t know what’s going on and his queries are ignored. Instead of being ushered off the bridge while a battle is going on, he just stands there helplessly wondering what’s going on and why nobody wants him to do anything. When things calm down and he’s debriefed, however, nobody explains anything… except that they will kill him if he tries to pilot an Eva unit again. It’s not until NERV busts in to rescue him that they even get around to mentioning that they are now members of an anti-NERV organization.
The whole movie is like this, with information being pointlessly withheld or barely explained. When Kaworu figures out he and Shinji are being tricked, he just… sits there with his head in his hand. He doesn’t do anything! His controls get disconnected eventually, but there is a long period of time when he just seems weirdly passive. There’s no reason for him to put a “kill me” bomb on his own neck, since he does not know that Gendo is tricking him and he might need to kill himself later. Nor does it make sense as a gesture to win Shinji’s trust, because the collar does not actually need to be on anybody at all and Shinji can’t in fact control it. And yet he does.
“Rei” in this movie is also weirdly out of the loop, to the point where discovering there was a prior Rei Ayanami seems to completely disorient her such that she’s asking herself—out loud—“what would Rei Ayanami do.” And the idea that Shinji is personally guilty of starting the Third Impact, such that everybody in WILLE treats him with hatred and contempt, is very dumb, but especially dumb to me because (as you might recall) Misato was cheering Shinji’s decision to rescue Rei from the sidelines at the time. I assume that this detail will get addressed in the last movie, but people in this movie act not only as if Shinji did it knowingly but also like he’s been conscious of this fact for the last fourteen years. And if Shinji really is this incredibly dangerous person who has to be treated like a rabid dog… why do they keep him alive? Killing a kid in cold blood might seem hard to do, but Misato does actually try to activate the bomb at one point—she’s just out of range.
So, yes, this is a complaint about the Rebuild movies being “different from the show” in the sense that nothing in Evangelion proper relies on its characters being stupid. Information is not pointlessly withheld among characters—if something is kept secret, it’s for a reason—and you are very aware of who knows what at any given time.
More than anything, I just finished this movie feeling angry. I resent that everything in these movies is stupider even as things are made more awesome in a “giant robots fighting” way. It’s cool seeing Asuka go “beast mode,” sure, but it doesn’t really mean anything here. It doesn’t mean something about her as a character, and it means nothing in terms of how events happen. I resent Mari, who at least at this point feels thinly characterized to the point where she might as well be an option in a dating sim: she’s a quirky flirty girl who drinks soda while she pilots!2 Asuka gets to do more in this movie, but her character is similarly thinned out: now she is an angry flirty girl! Asuka and Mari have some action scenes I couldn’t fit into my plot summary because they were so ultimately pointless. Like they’re there trying to stop Shinji from causing the Third Impact again, but they might as well not be.3 They might as well be practicing some sort of dance routine in the background while Kaworu sits there with his chin in his hand for all that any of them contribute to the situation.
In any case, I’m still willing to believe that the final movie will cause the irritation I’m feeling to click into place. But with every Rebuild, I’ve had the sense that these movies are wasting my time. Even if the last movie is amazing I feel as if this can’t be worth it.
I was tickled to see these Evangelion drawings by Moyoco Anno. I’m not clear on whether or not she can draw anymore, but it would be fun to see them in the style of Ai Yazawa too.
Fuyutsuki shows Shinji a picture of his mother, which he instantly recognizes as a picture of Rei, but the actual photo is maybe the least Rei-like Yui picture ever. More importantly, however, you can also see Mari in the picture.
Yui’s maiden name is also Ayanami now.
At the end of this movie, Gendo’s like: all according to plan. What would mean for something not to go according to plan, at this point, one wonders? At the rate these movies are going Ritsuko is going to shoot him in the next one and he’s going to go flying backward stating as foreseen in my scenario.
One big problem I had with this movie, aside from all the other big problems I had, was that it is genuinely very unclear what if any human life is left on Earth. It almost feels as if there is only NERV HQ with Gendo, Fuyutsuki, and Rei… and Misato’s ship. That can’t possibly be true but this also makes the movie feel very low stakes because when we’re talking about the end of the world now we’re talking about what? Fifty people? The world has already ended, guys. You are not repopulating the Earth. Read We Who Are About To.
There is some truly grotesque imagery in this movie, particularly the hollowed out, gigantic Rei head Gendo has that starts oozing blood. It is all visually striking, though not very effective for me in the moment because by that point I was too exasperated to care very much.
I found this movie exasperatingly pedagogical. Kaworu explaining to Shinji he likes the stars because he’s afraid of change, everybody telling Shinji to grow up, the repeated statements that you can’t change the past, and so on. Part of why I find this irritating is because it feels like it’s aimed at instructing somebody who is not actually me, like you think this is all so cool but it’s bad actually. No! I do not think that! Stop lecturing me!
It is possible the final Rebuild installment will be on August 30 instead of August 23. One of the two.
Fuyutsuki also explains to Shinji that his mom is in Unit 01 and that Rei is a clone of his mother. He does that a propos of nothing, but then, it’s not as if Shinji was going to ask.
By coincidence I was reading some of James Blish’s science fiction criticism before I watched this movie and this passage came to mind watching Mari:
Another example: No skilled writer known to me would defend the practice—very common among beginners—of substituting funny hats for characterization. To say that a given character always wears a helicopter beanie, or always spits on his hands before speaking, or always takes two steps to the north and one to the west before washing his face, is to put a tag on him which will enable the reader to place him whenever he appears, but it is not all that a writer must do to characterize that character; many incompetent writers, all the same, never go farther with characterization than this kind of tagging.
(From The Issue at Hand.) It also came to mind looking at the new bridge crew.
Also nobody seems to think that Shinji is dead after the bomb they put on his neck explodes, a bomb they presumably all still think is on his neck…?
Nana Genesis Evangelion
I watched the rebuilds with my mother back in 2020. We got halfway through this one before I had to leave, but on my next visit she asked politely, “Can we watch something else instead?”
We eventually finished it before the final film released (which we finished in one sitting and she liked), but yeah, I think you talked me out of rewatching this one.