Hello everybody.
*clears throat*
As I have previously detailed
here I used to not feel confident enough to really judge this movie as a movie; I felt I didn't have the right to complain about something that I didn't understand, I had a hard time just... seeing it as writing because I was rendered so numb by the in-universe events, and I felt it hurt so bad, I couldn't even see beauty about it - EoE never stopped being beautiful, in a things-falling-appart way, it was flowing, a reaching of a full circle.
But with Q, I was thinking... like this? I certainly don't "like" any of the things that happen, all these likeable, complex characters either die, or
get ruined.
...but now, after all this time to reflect on it/try to decipher it, I think I have finally been able to reach a conclusion:
No. I do not dislike it.
In a way, it's obvious - if I was told something I write threw someone into this kind of horror, I would call that a success...
...the realization started, like, with fringe things. I find the setting interesting. I like the surreality of the whole mechano-angels and their use of EVA fins. I *LOVE* the fact that science marches on, and whatever I think of the character's actions, I tend to be in the corner that tends to classify them as understandable darkly-realistic instead of bad writing.
I began finding some beauty, I guess, in the moments of light from before everything completely crashed down - don't all stories eventually end in death? It were those little moments of drowned-out improvement, the wasted good-intentions, the residual feelings of now impossible connection, the... purity that came out.
Rei is gone, but we saw Shinji prive that he really was after *her*.
Misato and Shinji will never be a family again, but the fact that she couldn't shoot him is...like a flesh and blood mother. Not a good or sensible one, but there was a connection that just doesn't completely go away.
"You think that even if you show your son how you live, that won't help him?" No further comments needed.
So, I think it's a sad, sad, bleak, bleak movie, depression pressed onto cels, but its so effective because its
true. Which, as I have noticed by now, seems to be a common perception in the German fandom.
Look at the comments under the newest Kaworu fanarts
hereOr... youtube comments in German.
Or the guy at the convention I recently went to who snatched away the last Rei figurine before my eyes XD Damnit, there went my sister with all the money she saved and nearly emptied the stand XD
There seem to be a lot of people who also had this extremely bleak perception of the film... and were in
awe of it.
There was one youtube comment where the person replied to me with something like, "Poor Shinji indeed. But the way you're squeezed into the PoV makes the movie a very personal experiemce"
Yes. I think it does.