Evangelion: 3.0 You Can (Not) Redo

Evangelion 2.0 had the clear goal of dismantling and "destroying" Eva. It’s an accelerationist attempt to take the franchise’s idiosyncrasies and push them to the point of overflow. As I said in my 2.0 review, this approach is flawed—trying to critique hypersexualization and voyeurism while indulging in them for audience satisfaction. 3.0, however, is the end result and thematic payoff of that project. It’s obtuse, confusing, and baffling, throwing Shinji into an unfamiliar space with barely any knowledge. What it succeeds in doing is recapturing the freshness and mystique of the original TV series. Despite drowning in homages and genre familiarity, Eva always had a certain mysticism—a slow drip-feed of information that kept the world feeling unknowable and exotic. 3.0 taps into that, even if it stumbles in the process.

At the end of 2.0, Shinji, as a shounen protagonist, sacrifices everything to save his waifu. He reaches out to Rei, and the relatively normal life the cast enjoyed is sunset. In 3.0, he pays for that choice—the entire world has functionally rebuilt itself around him. And yet, the pilots are still bound by the curse of Eva. There’s a frustration with the iterative nature of Evangelion properties, a frustration from Anno himself that his work has been misread and eroded over time. The franchise itself is trapped in an iterative time loop, an idea that’s been implied since the Evangelion manga. This context helps explain why 3.0 is structured the way it is—it aggressively branches off from normal conditions in a way that’s unprecedented.

One of the failures of Eva as a franchise is overexposing its setting, filling in every blank, and answering every lingering question. It shrinks the world. 3.0 actively resists this, even if its execution isn’t perfect. If 2.0 is an exploration of the franchise’s lecherous, bombastic side, then 3.0 is a jab at its esotericism. We’re given only bits and pieces of this new world, and the characters themselves wall Shinji off, drowning in the same incoherence and isolation that made the TV anime so unnerving. That’s why 3.0 is the most creatively interesting film in the tetralogy.

But the execution is where it falls apart. Off the bat, I think 3.0 is an ugly film. I’m not a huge fan of the 3DCG look, and combining it with stark pastels and a "clean" art direction makes for something I don’t particularly enjoy looking at. The overarching conflict feels flimsy and awkwardly explored. I understood most of the plot beats, but they feel slapdash and half-baked. Lore snippets and worldbuilding is laid out and it just goes in one ear and out the other. What really gets me is how everyone omits crucial information from Shinji. The film tries to recreate the pains of the TV anime’s "hedgehog’s dilemma," where nobody talks to each other and everyone ends up hurt, but the way it’s handled here is a poor replica of the festering, cancerous barrier of understanding that's built up over the TV anime's runtime. Shinji isn’t just left in the dark—he’s deliberately kept in the dark. He only finds out what he did wrong from Kaworu hours after leaving WILLE, while everyone else just acts distant in a way that feels forced and frustrating.

3.0 is good, but “good” is all I can give it. The writing, characterization, and plotting pale in comparison to the original series. At a minimum, I respect it for breaking from expectations and knocking viewers on their asses after the spectacle of 2.0. It’s bold, it’s fresh, but it’s also flawed.