algernoninwonderland:

So, Evangelion 3.0 + 1.0 is somehow even worse than the leaks could have lead me to believe. The rare things the film does right are dwarfed by everything else it attempts to do. It’s a disappointment.

I read the leaks back in March, saw the camrip footage, and I naively thought, hey, maybe the overall film will be better than the few minutes we’ve seen so far. It isn’t. It’s frankly quite bad, but not in a “so bad it’s good” way. Just plain old bad.

(this sort-of-review-although-it-isn’t-really-one contains spoilers)

The Good:

• Some parts of this film look nice. The scenes at the Third Village, for the most part, have some nice background art, the water looks especially nice, there are nice sequences in there in which things move nicely or look nice.
• I’ve got many issues with the Third Village, but the film’s best scenes take place there. I wish the film had stayed there, just a village at the edge of the apocalypse, the headless Evas wandering in the distance, it’s kind of poetic.
• It was nice to see Toji and Hikari again.
• Hideaki Anno doing some Moyoco Anno product placement. As he should be.
• It’s obvious they were experimenting with lots of techniques during the making of this film (watch the NHK documentary if you want to see how much of a shitshow the production was) and it’s nice that they’re trying things I guess.
• Farmer Not-Rei is cute. Mortified Shinji sucks at fishing.
• Penpen’s descendants are many and prosperous.
• Part of the flashback-alternate-thingy Asuka sequence looks interesting, it’s nothing we didn’t already know but I enjoyed that brief moment.
• Utada Hikaru.
• The money it made will be used for other animation projects, so that’s neat.
• That’s it.

The Bad:

• It’s something Akihiro Koyama pointed out in their review (translated by the great @ngedaily, which I came across thanks to qmisato , thank god for her), butvillages don’t work like that. The Third Village is a nice idea and all, but it’s very childish and doesn’t really hold up to scrutiny. The film makes no mention of organisation outside of “WILLE gives us stuff so that we don’t die”.
• We start with sort-of-creepy Not-Rei discovering the world around her (which, good) and then Poka Poka Rei is back, only she’s Born Yesterday this time, also she’s programmed to like Shinji for meta reasons I guess? Or maybe not? I am so done with that bullshit. What is that supposed to be? Pandering to shippers or something? Who cares about shipping in Evangelion? I never did.
• There was no storyboard for that film. It shows, but not for the best.
• The soundtrack is, for the most part, forgettable. Also, the audio mixing is bizarre.

The Ugly:

• Some parts of this film look nice. Other parts look awful. A lot of parts. They look like they’re unfinished, like the art direction isn’t good enough to make a coherent-looking film, or cuts haven’t been checked and corrected properly. The character art looks off more often than it should. The animation is very inconsistent, which is concerning for a theatrical release.
• It’s nice that they tried lots of techniques for that film. Shame the results are very mixed and they tend to be bad. I don’t mind GNR Anna Anaconda all that much, but the white headless bodies look like the most default asset ever. In general, the conspicuous CGI doesn’t look otherwordly, it looks like garbage. Not “intentionally artistically out of place” but “straight up terrible” and boy oh boy is it terrible. The MOCAP Eva fights are straight out of Ultraman, but it looks incredibly goofy and almost amateurish, it has neither the look or the feel of EVA.
• There’s that one sequence in the Third Village when Asuka attempts to force-feed Shinji and they’re trying to do something with camera angles and so they’re 3D models, I think? It looks terrible, it kind of gave me a headache. I get what they were trying to make but it doesn’t work.
• The characters are barely characters at all. Ritsuko, Misato? Who are they? The characters we spend the most time with aren’t made to be that interesting. At all. Nothing interesting is done with any of them. I wish pink-haired WILLE girl whose name I already forgot and Sakura had successfully shot Shinji.
• Some really clunky expository dialogue that makes no sense coming out of the characters’ mouths within the diegesis of the film. It feels like this was written by children.
• All the technobabble and pseudophilosophical bullshit is just so much. I zoned out and stopped caring about any of that. Then it was just regular Instrumentality again but even more, only this time with Gendo, and it added nothing of value to the character and felt extremely out of place considering what the previous films had been about. It was just stupidly written and stupidly put on screen. That’s supposed to be the big stake of the film and I couldn’t be bothered to care.
• There’s some Naruto bullshit now because fuck you. What do you mean this was never introduced beforehand and it’s coming out of nowhere? Wheeeeee!
• All that stupid tasteless gross fanservice that adds absolutely nothing to the story and clashes with the mood of absolutely all the scenes they’re in. Some really fucking stupid blocking choices just to shove anime butts and boobs at the viewer’s face. All that Asuka and Mari fanservice was so awful. Who is that even for? The answer is “nonces” btw.
• Ken-Ken. All of… that. I don’t even want to process that. It’s just so much. I hated every second of it. Made me want to stop watching altogether.
• I like meta. This is called disappearing up your own ass, though. It’s incredibly ham-fisted, with the worst namedrop possible. It could have worked, had things been done competently. They weren’t done competently, and so it doesn’t work.
• It’s a story about hope… The hope that one day you’ll become an adult, that is, a salaryman, and meet Moyoco Anno a gorgeous gal with big boobs of your own, also you should be having children. How much money did Abe pay you for that, Hideaki? You hypocrite. You don’t even have children of your own and you want to lecture us about that?

It’s a bad film. Anno directed a bad, uninteresting film, Khara made a bad film, it’s just bad and there isn’t much more to it than that. If you haven’t watched it yet, skip it, it’s not worth your time. Watch Shin Godzilla instead, that’s much better.