Eight months ago I finished Evangelion and wrote a review about how I didn't like it. Here. I talked about how it's incredibly confusing, doesn't even try to explain anything to the viewer and I also expressed my immense hatred towards most of the characters because of how annoying they are. Guess what, EoE doesn't change any of this.
As someone that didn't like the original series, this movie is better in only one aspect: runtime. Because it's a movie it doesn't suffer from the pacing issue the anime suffered from, which is a good thing, but aside from that this movie pretty much consists of Shinji being a whiny bitch as usual and telling himself he isn't good enough over and over. Sure, the plot is different but once again they don't bother to actually explain what's going on and unless you look up some kind of explanation it's pretty much impossible to fully grasp what the show and this movie is even about. I've heard people say "trying to understand Eva is stupid" or "it's all about the characters, the story isn't important". This argument would work if the movie actually developed any of the characters or tried to expand on them, which was the case for Misato and Asuka (somewhat) but Shinji, The main character?
He didn't change one bit.
If Evangelion's characters are well written, Demon Slayer has the best plot of all time. Someone told me that you need to have a certain mindset to enjoy Evangelion so you're able to relate with the characters and that may be true, but I guess I just don't have that required mindset. If Eva is supposed to be all about the characters then the movie shouldn't be focusing on the plot 80% of the time. Sure the plot needs to progress for the characters to develop, but as I already mentioned, the first 2/3rds of the movie is just Shinji sitting on his ass and crying nonstop. We get to see a little more of Asuka's true personality this time around which I enjoyed, but Rei is still the same NPC she was in the series. Her being a clone doesn't change the fact that her character isn't well written.
The plot in this movie is just as, if not more convoluted than the series and it just becomes a complete mess in the last ~25 minutes. It tries so hard to be abstract and while the visuals are really nice to look at, which is the case throughout the entire movie btw, it feels like Hideaki took 7 different drugs at once while directing this last part. I like weird shit and I usually like this kind of abstract way of storytelling but The End of Evangelion's story is so bare-bones that it just ends up being abstract animation for the sake of being abstract animation. Usually when I dislike an anime/movie etc. I can still understand why others might like it, when it comes to EoE, I don't. The fights and visuals were the only thing I enjoyed about this movie, but all in all it had the same problems the series had. If you're a fan of Evangelion, you'll most likely love EoE but I can't recommend it to anyone that didn't. I'll still watch the other movies, but I'll lower my expectations so I won't be disappointed again.
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# Visually stunning, otherwise incredibly boring. In the end, I was left with more questions than answers.
