Evangelion: 3.0 You Can (Not) Redo (2012)

Rebuild of Evangelion has earned the dubious distinction of become one of the most troubled and long-delayed anime movie series ever. At current projections of 4.0’s release in June 2020, a child conceived when Rebuild was announced in 2007 would be just about old enough to pilot an Evangelion by the time the series finishes. Hideaki Anno announced it with grand plans to revitalize anime and again revolutionize the industry, but 1.0 and 2.0 then turned out to be almost beat for beat remakes of the original TV series. (A NYT reviewer understandably initially thought, until corrected, that they actually reused the original cel artwork.)

More troublingly, the behind-the-scenes material, particularly the 2.0 CRC interviews & drafts, suggested a production which was creatively lost at sea, with no sense of what it meant to ‘rebuild’ Evangelion, struggles to integrate a character foisted on the series for merchandising purposes (Mari Makinami), wildly divergent proposals for changes (even by the standards of drafts & screenwriting in general or previous Evangelion work specifically), many mysteries set up with few answered and the buck passed to later films, and a Hideaki Anno who appears thoroughly bored and completely uninterested in his own project and barely present much less coming up with wild new ideas nourished over 2 decades.

This impression was only hammered in by the extraordinary delays (3.0 came out fully 3 years after 2.0, and 4.0 will, optimistically, arrive 8 years after that—for a remake, by a fully-funded special-purpose studio, working on what was planned to be a tetralogy from the start!), and by Anno’s own numerous projects outside of Rebuild, ranging from producing a movie about a porn director or Ultraman to creating a kaiju monster museum to launching an animation festival to directing the Shin Godzilla (which was enormously successful & doubtless fulfilled a life dream for Anno, but did not help 4.0 get done) or even voice-acting the leading character in a Ghibli movie (‽) as documented in The Kingdom of Dreams and Madness.

Halfway through Rebuild, it is an artistic failure (however much money it may have made). Characterization, as the staff frequently notes in the 2.0 CRC, has been sacrificed on the altar of running time, forcing a ruthless sacrifice of all scenes focusing on anyone other than Shinji Ikari, in order to fit in the necessary action. After 2.0, despite a dramatic twist and finally a major divergence from the original TV series, Rebuild is left in a precarious position: half the series had now been used up, and every second is precious. The remaining 2 films must accomplish the near-impossible: deliver the missing characterization, pay off all the IOUs the first 2 movies incurred, have a meaningful ending, and incidentally, comment on and surpass the meaning of NGE TV/EoE to show artistic & personal growth on the part of Hideaki Anno & the anime industry.

So 3.0 was a do-or-die movie for Rebuild. There is simply no time left if 3.0 screws up. One movie alone cannot possibly deliver on even 2 of those goals while still working as an Evangelion movie. If 3.0 can’t deliver characterization and introspection but devolves into just more action, then it’s over for Rebuild. Anno will have turned his back on what made him interesting and ceased caring about being more than entertainment & fanservice. Some of his interviews have been more than a little disturbing in this respect, but 3.0 will be the proof. If there is anything great to Rebuild, 3.0 is where it will show up by jumping off from 2.0’s twist ending, and even if it is merely good, there will still be hope for Rebuild pulling it off in the end. 2.0 raised our hopes that our patience would be rewarded & Rebuild would work out: what now, Anno, we have been wondering?

But… 3.0 is a terrible movie. It fails as a movie and it fails as the third film in Rebuild. It is filled with irrelevant meaningless changes, visuals for the sake of visuals, and casually tosses on even more mysteries, with the attitude that fans are morons for caring and they should be screwed over like the fans of Lost, and if you pay attention to anything or cared, that just makes you a sucker. 3.0 is a movie which disrespects its viewers at every turn, and I have rarely been more glad to have pirated a movie because it would be a crime to pay the creators of this. I can’t even praise the visuals or animation because they are often so poorly executed (seriously, what is with the chins?), with painfully cliche (the montages) or outright ugly CGI—astonishing for a well-funded blockbuster film which was in production for so many years. One can only conclude that the 2.0 CRC was right: no one at Khara, much less Anno, has any vision for Rebuild, and are just slapping together random scraps of ideas heedless of any artistic unity or the fact that they are issuing IOUs they cannot pay off; I have to imagine an intern at Khara being assigned to complete the screenplay and desperately filling out all the blank pages with their yaoi circle’s last fanfic, because nothing else can explain the way the movie lolls through the endless Kaworu segments. (It’s amazing to think that the original NGE TV Kaworu does more in ~10 minutes of screentime than 3.0 Kaworu does in several times that.)

It doesn’t just fail to provide characterization or depth, it actively destroys with gimmicks what depth characters had left over from the original series & first two Rebuilds. A whole new pack of characters is introduced for no reason. The 2.0 trailer scenes are dropped without a word. New Reis show up. Old characters like Misato or Ritsuko are warped and left flat as hairdos & hats replace heroines & hope. Everyone except the Kaworu fans are unhappy with 3.0, even though the Kaworu fans should be the most incandescent with rage because 3.0 makes his death completely meaningless, futile, irrelevant, and pointless since there was no need to put on the DSS explosive collar whatsoever and no reason he would expect to die—compared to his death in NGE TV where his death was both necessary and voluntary. But I guess the fujoshi were thrown enough fanservice and piano-playing to make them overlook oh-so-minor issues like “s—ing all over the thematic value of Kaworu’s death” (so maybe 3.0’s contempt for fans is justified after all). Or consider Mari Makinami: 2 movies now, and her character remains completely worthless. So much for her character being the key to “destroying Eva”.

Rebuild started with a promise to abandon the secrets & mysteries as exhausted & “12 years old”, yet piled them on with nary a care, from Mari to the Key of Nebuchadnezzar to the flash shots of the ‘Adams’ to the coffins on the moon to SEELE’s activities and so on and so forth. It started as a promise to revolutionize the stagnant anime industry again, yet Anno proceeded to bankroll Studio Khara/1.0 entirely by himself (“100%” he says in 2011) and by taking on this incredible financial risk, produced a completely conservative money maker that was shot-by-shot in some cases. We thought it was going to move beyond otaku and fanservice as part of its general appeal, and it gave us the ‘slutsuit’ in 2.0, and then 3.0 provided even more fujoshi fanservice than they had ever hoped for. We were promised something that couldn’t “be understood just by spacing out and watching it”, something that will “will be better than the last series”. We thought it would revitalize the old character drama, and show us new depth as just desserts for our patience, when it is determined to drain all the water, leaving only barren sandy desert. And so on and so forth. All these promises have been broken. Rebuild has not accomplished a single thing it planned to do, and no one at Khara seems to care. Evangelion fans are trapped on a ghost ship headed straight for the rocks.

Watching 3.0 was a terrible shock to me. So disappointing was it that I have put off writing this review for 6 years. It was not just realizing that Rebuild was doomed, and all these years waiting were wasted. (Rebuild is one of several reasons why I now insist on watching only complete series.) It was the shock of seeing that Hideaki Anno hasn’t grown at all. He has nothing to say in Rebuild. He has grown older, but not better, nor wiser. Rebuild is nothing but a betrayal of NGE TV & EoE, one which contaminates their accomplishments. It seems he doesn’t even understand what he did, as he can (not) redo it anymore, and worse, he doesn’t give a damn about any of it. Rebuild is just a lucrative cash cow to build up Studio Khara and fund his pet projects, much the same way that George Lucas cared little about Star Wars when he made Return of the Jedi and was more concerned about how to save ILM/Skywalker Ranch post-divorce (see Secret History of Star Wars) and unsurprisingly Lucas ultimately sold off the Star Wars franchise entirely to owners who have been even poorer custodians than he was.

It would not be going too far to say that watching 3.0 killed my interest in Evangelion. Literally overnight I stopped my Evangelion research. How could I bring myself to care about the development of Evangelion when Rebuild is such shameless garbage and Anno treats Evangelion with such contempt? It is one thing to document how the mysteries & allusions are superficial at best, since Evangelion fans know that stuff like Kabbalah is merely stage-setting trimmings for the psychological drama, but another thing to see the creators trash precisely that in favor of more worthless trimmings. I still follow Evangelion news a little bit, and I’ll probably watch 4.0 to see how the trainwreck ends, but I can’t call myself an Evangelion fan anymore. The spell has been broken.

The sole bright spot is Shiro Sagisu’s soundtrack, which while not working all that well with the movie (probably because 3.0 stinks), does work nicely on its own. So far Sagisu’s Rebuild OSTs have shown an inverse correlation with the movies: the worse they are, the better he gets. I look forward to the 4.0 OST, if not 4.0 itself.