Evangelion: 3.0 You Can (Not) Redo (2012)

Evangelion: 3.0 You Can (Not) Redo arrives as the third panel of the Rebuild tetralogy, and it wastes no time making the viewer feel unwelcome. Shinji Ikari wakes fourteen years late, unaged, fitted with an explosive collar, and informed by former allies that his last heroic act ended the world. The film is gorgeous and hostile, a two-hour tantrum rendered in immaculate CG water. Hideaki Anno has never been interested in reassurance, and here he withholds it with something close to relish.

The emotional center belongs to Kaworu Nagisa. The piano duets, the shared quarters, the collar moved from one neck to another: all of it constitutes a romance presented plainly and without apology. This is the film's most sincere register. Two boys, a ruined city, and a love that ends in a beheading. The melancholy Shinji carries, his catatonia, his reflex to flee, is treated as character instead of condition, which keeps it from hardening into a case study. It is affecting. It is also, notably, not a lecture.

Elsewhere the ledger runs thin. Misato commands a flying battleship, and Asuka and Mari fly with competence, yet the film shows no sustained interest in making an argument about any of it. The Earth lies in ruins for metaphysical reasons, not carbon ones. There is no economic critique, no racial commentary, no body diversity, no historical revisionism. The obscurity here is narrative, not sermonizing. Anno withholds meaning because he finds withholding meaningful. We are left with a beautiful, frustrating object, and a viewer who has seen worse and will, in all likelihood, see worse again.