Evangelion is my favorite and by far the best anime I have seen, and its movie End Of Evangelion, is absolute perfection. It is quite easily the greatest ending of all time. So already these mediocre rebuilds felt like a slap in the face to the beautiful finality of Evangelions original ending but with Evangelion 3.0+1.01, it had to live up to being the new ending for its series and surpass End Of Evangelion. So, is there any way to surpass perfection? Well, definitely not like this because this is fucking bad.

Evangelion 3.0+1.01 makes me sad. Not because of any emotional beats (because all of them are not deserved or straight up taken from the original series) but because this is now the newly accepted conclusion to my favorite franchise. I know that the common opinion is that people are loving this movie, and I'm happy to hear that, but I didn't, and I want to express why that is. First off the positives.

The visuals were overall very appealing until things started moving
The soundtrack was full of bangers (especially that last song oh my god)
Made Gendo a better character overall
Although it wasn't earned, as a diehard Eva fan it was hard not to like the last scene

Now for my critiques which far outweigh my positives, unfortunately. I have a lot of minor nitpicks, like how the CGI animation was Berserk 2016 level bad at times, and how the movie stretches on for too long after its climax (which comes out of nowhere by the way) but all of them are nothing in the face of my two biggest complaints.

BIG ISSUE 1.

Evangelion 3.0+1.01's characters are hollow shells of their former selves, reduced from some of the greatest ever written to insanely mediocre. Take Asuka for example. In the original series, she had adopted an egotistical and too sexual for her age persona due to her trauma from her mother. When exposed, she was plunged into a depression that she overcame by realizing her mother's love. It's a phenomenal character arc. In this movie, Asuka's character is.... angry girl with an eyepatch. She went from one of my favorite characters ever to a character I didn't care for at all. Same thing with Misato, whose entire original character is discarded to be a painfully generic commander. Rei is quite possibly the worst offender. She's gone from a clone searching for purpose through connection to a brain-dead clone who doesn't know a single thing and has to learn what everything is like babies and baths and saying thank you. The movie spends 45 FUCKING MINUTES following her weak ass character arc. Even my boy Shinji gets disrespected as his development mimics End Of Evangelion but fails to execute the way that movies did...which leads to my next point

BIG ISSUE 2.

Evangelion 3.0+1.0 fails at recreating moments from End Of Evangelion HARD. This movie's final act is basically a reskin of scenes from EoE but done laughably bad when compared to that movie. To avoid spoilers I won't go into too much detail but moments like a certain characters death lacks all the emotional impact of EoE, the super similar climax fails with hardly any build-up and awkward execution, and the ending, while attempting a similar message as EoE doesn't hold a candle to it, as it misses out on all the subtlety, impact, and build up through Shinji's original decision that that movie had. 3.0+1.0 also has a long hallucinatory sequence of intrapersonal reflection for the characters, and while the look into Gendos past was very appreciated, this sequence tried to cram the original depth of the characters in at the last second.

The idea to rebuild an already flawless franchise was troubling from the start but to end not only the movies but the entire franchise with this? I can't help but wonder where the genius that created the original series and movie has gone. If you want a gripping, deep, horrifying, and perfect ending for this series you won't find it here. It was already done 24 years ago.