Evangelion: 2.0 You Can (Not) Advance (2009)

The second panel of the Rebuild tetralogy does what second panels do. It adds a pilot, the mysterious Mari Illustrious Makinami, renames Asuka, and stages three or four of the finest mecha set pieces ever committed to cel and CG. Shinji still mopes, Gendo still withholds, Tokyo-3 still gets rearranged. The machinery is immaculate. The despair is thorough. Hideaki Anno and his collaborators have kept the psychological furniture exactly where the 1995 series left it, which is either reverence or a shortage of nerve, depending on the evening.

On the cultural ledger, this is a 2009 Japanese production with almost no interest in the social controversies that would later consume Western film discourse. The cast is entirely Japanese performers voicing Japanese characters, and nobody involved is assembling an ensemble around representation. Women hold real power here: Misato runs operations, Asuka and Mari fight with aggression and competence, and the film never pauses to request applause for it. Kaworu's post-credits promise to show Shinji true happiness carries the franchise's long-standing homoerotic undercurrent, kept implicit and brief. Shinji's depression and Asuka's brittleness sit at the center of the drama, though the film treats them as damage to be endured, not as a condition to be affirmed. There is no racial commentary, no climate sermon, no economic critique of NERV's military-industrial arrangement, and no body-diverse casting to speak of.

The remainder is philosophy without a pamphlet. The film is dense, existential, occasionally incomprehensible, and wholly unconcerned with instructing its audience about contemporary politics. It lectures only about the impossibility of human connection, a subject it has earned the right to lecture about. Score it low on the current index. Score it high on the older one. The angels arrive, the wings of light unfurl, and the world nearly ends again, and at no point does anyone stop to explain to us how we ought to feel about it. That restraint is the film's quiet virtue, and its commercial liability, and probably its reason for existing at all.

{"thematic_tags": ["sequel"]}