Evangelion 2.0 is an aggressively voyeuristic, indulgent middle finger to the fanbase -- except it’s also trying to take their money. It's almost pornographic in its framing, giving the lowest caliber of Eva fan exactly what they want -- wholesome interactions and soft character bits, fetishistic angles and aggressively intentional male gaze shots. If you've seen Anno's take on Love and Pop back in the 90s, it's almost reminiscent of the presentation in that story. It's such a consistent, deliberated creative choice that anyone adjusted to the original's storytelling will be thrown off and those that exist in a bubble of slop-eating dakimakura collections and shipping wars detached from the anime won't notice anything wrong going on.

Hideaki Anno wants to ruin and destroy Evangelion. He elevates the elements of the narrative that attract the kinds of fans he dislikes and wants to use their sales to meticulously detach himself from his most notable project. That's a fine aspiration to have, but it makes 2.0 an incredibly dull project that has nothing to say besides presenting an obvious layer of meta-commentary. "Old GAINAX" and a lot of its projects are just bursting with love and passion for Japanese genre fiction. Look at shit like the Daicon IV animation back in the 80s. Evangelion works because it's such an earnest explosion of geek culture and homage where Anno was just chock full of ideas he wanted to explore. The Rebuilds are shockingly hollow, relying on that original work to plot themselves along and string a coherent narrative together. Little of that passion and lightning-in-a-bottle energy is present, and while I can respect lofty meta-commentary poking at the legacy a series has left behind, that's literally all this movie brings to the table.

You can't plaster me with hours of fanservice to ogle at on screen and then vaguely hint at it being "meta". This makes it almost indistinguishable for most of the tetralogy from unthinking pandering to the audience. This is the dilemma Kill la Kill video essayists find themselves trapped in -- the boobs and butts on screen are obviously there to tittilate its audience even if there's thought behind it. To me, the commentary completely falls apart when it's mostly played straight up until future movies that poke at how tragic it is. Mari kind of exists as that destructive element of the narrative dragging in a sledgehammer to the franchise of Eva, but it's just not going anywhere. You have a drawn out movie with a full-fat runtime that has a very simple and tired message. Like in Love and Pop, a lot of this stuff is clearly lascivious and supposed to be framed as female autonomy being encroached on, but L&P is unsettling and unnerving and real in a way 2.0 could never achieve. Dropping around 2 billion yen on an Eva sequel that two-faces and pleases both unthinking audiences and that briefly pokes fun at itself doesn't feel earnest, it's duplicitious and frustrating. Anno's means to "destroy Eva" is just making a creatively uninteresting movie.

Looking at Anno's modern legacy, he has trapped himself in a prison of iteration -- even after leaving Eva behind, his recent output is all "rebooting" stuff he liked as a kid. This is a director that has been squeezed dry of all his creative juices and high-concept and left to just reconstruct and rebuild his favorite childhood IPs. The Rebuilds are a cry for help, Anno is literally framing Eva as a series as a kind of fucked-up eternal recurrence loop he can't break out of and needs to put to rest.