kuribo-04 wrote:This has always been obvious to me, but apparently the fact that she pilots an Eva makes people think she is supposed to be much more. She is there to serve as a contrast to the other characters who suffer piloting their Evas. Mari has fun with it.

I think that's the best way of putting it.

Yes Mari lacks character depth.
Yes she's there to serve as fan-service and as an action sequence queen.
Yes they probably could've given her more backstory.

But as it stands, she's just another Eva pilot to be a contrast to Shinji/Asuka/Rei who are all miserable piloting. She's an example of how much better the events presented in these films would have unfolded if every pilot just simply did their job and cut the drama. Plus the movie isn't out, maybe they'll give her some more characterization.

Who the fuck is making these machine enemies they are fighting ?

Evil Nerv?

But Nerv is empty and wrecked with no one there apart from Gendo and Fuutski.
I know some shit was automated there but neither of them are engineers.

Nah wait I loved this

Though it's just an action scene it's actually fairly impactful, largely because of the Music - This guitar-y thing isn't what I'd expect of EVA, maybe it was supposed to give off a south european vibe to go with the location, or just trying something new, but it did the trick, nifty dynamic visuals for sure, like the shot of the tower from below

I guess now we know what everyone's plugsuit color would be XD
How the cycle closes now Maya is the one keeping newbies in their proper places.

Everything Ritsuko says does or wears is a power move, she might be forced into the Hazard suit but she has the lab coat above it
I like how everything still has a haphazard, "duct tape" feel with the operators typing away in a semi-exposed location

There are no people or animals but some of those trees look green. That has interesting implications

As a Mari fan from day one I appreciated that she sings the "opening" again and that it's basically typical vintage content, we got to see both her firearms skills as well as her brute force fighting that was kinda missing from Q after being so memorable in 2.0, she continues to be heroic and kick butt like no tomorrow, whilese being relatably eccentric & haphazard which is what i want from my mari content
I mean im still hoping for some in-depht material but I've accepted that she's a supporting character, perhaps because we've seen in some of the 2.0 CR scenes and interviews what that would have been like
For now Im team mentor/mentee rather than girlfriends simply because she literally says 'little'? But if it turns out to be girlfriends I'll happily stand corrected I mean Nagara's a gfairly new character she can be whatever the authors want her to be

But I like how she was standing there in the end almost like a commanding presence, certainly someone with a plan, explaining how they'll use the parts etc. - At least she is thinking of recovering the pilots though its intetresting that she names Shinji first, though kinda continues the point that she seems to realize that he's just a young person in way over his head



As for the machines - I figured that SEELE made & launched them in advance or something like had them prepared BEFORE things went full apocalyptic? But who knows


I love that at this point Maya has seen so much "impossible things" that she just dismisses it as a lazy excuse

It feels as if we never waited.

This is utterly beautiful to look at. The action is amazing. Scene 2 was supposed to feature pink hair girl too. We'll see.

This did not have the emotional punch seeing Shinji and co would have had, but that is not a flaw but completely normal.

I love that we have this team of inspiring and hopeful characters.

@Kendrix:
>Was the "predecessor" who left the massage Kaji?
Why would Kaji leave a message in French? It was a French Nerv branch; Maya and the others were probably just picking up where the locals had left off.

>I figured that SEELE made [the machines]

You can see a Neo-Nerv logo inside the scope of the 4-Four-C before it turns blue.

@mastervampire: In Q, we see them mass-producing Eva parts in Nerv HQ. How? We're not meant to know yet.

I mean the WILLE crew is sorta crucial to portraying the effort that Misato & Ritsuko are spearheading - how they managed to give ppl hope and make do with a ragtag bunch of survivors, like they treat Shinji badly but apart from that Misato in particular seems like a super inspirational person and we saw in Q that many of the crew greatly admire her, overall she's objectively heroic, though even heroic people are just human and suceptible to human grudges, like the random WILLE crew need to be there to show WILLE's "positive side"
They are trying to preserve humanity against terrible odds, Shinji kinda went from being a part of this effort to being caught in the crossfire as colateral damage, which was honestly an interesting thing to do with all characters involved and im curious to see where it goes

Also upon rewatch it seems like Mari is basically directing battle Operations in Misato's absence (while Ritsuko directs the Scientists), telling the Wunder what to do etc.
It's kinda like Misato & ritsuko have become Gendo & Fuyutsuki while Maya has taken young!Ritsuko's place and Asuka & Mari are kinda in the space that young!Misato used to inhabit, they're definitely higher up the command chain - Asuka gives Misato a Last-Name-And-Rank sass in Q while they're interrogating Shinji.

Again it's kinda a pity that we didn't get to see that relationship establish itself for all that one can probably figure.
At least with Asuka we have the discarded 2.0 CR to show how they might've gone from rivals to comrades
Misato probably didn't like Mari doing everything by herself and leaking but not wholly disclosing info, she seemed to distrust "adults" / authority figures, but her instinct would be to protect a young person under her care and in a sense 28+ y/o Mari is not unlike 28 year old Misato - Kinda impulsive, eccentric, having a lot of faith etc. so you could see them coming to trust each other eventually to end up where they are now



also, where IS Misato? The Wunder is right there. She must be attending to something important, something plot relevant that theyre not telling us yet

Reichu wrote:@Kendrix:
>Was the "predecessor" who left the massage Kaji?
Why would Kaji leave a message in French? It was a French Nerv branch; Maya and the others were probably just picking up where the locals had left off.

>I figured that SEELE made [the machines]

You can see a Neo-Nerv logo inside the scope of the 4-Four-C before it turns blue.

@mastervampire: In Q, we see them mass-producing Eva parts in Nerv HQ. How? We're not meant to know yet.

You're right! Must be the assembly lines that Shinji saw then.
It's actually pretty deep that they take a moment to appreciate the random nameless French NERV techies who presumably died in either near TI or the unspecified event after where NERv got raided and Lillith ended up in the state we see in Q, probably fighting to the last, struggling against oblivion just like WILLE are now

Literary Eagle wrote:Wait, what part was that? I heard Ogata say "ketsumatsu" which means ending, not girl. And the French interpreter translated that as "fin", which also means ending.

Yeah apparently his friend just interpreted it wrong because I heard the same thing elsewhere from other people.

I really wonder what these two endings were, what Ogata answered, and how that influenced the final product

Like, was it about how she thinks Shinji might choose in a certain Situation, or about crafting the perfect "Last temptation" in the vein of the og ep 26 AU scene?
WILL there be an AU scene, perhaps of Shinji & co living as regular 20somethings?

Maybe he'll do exactly the opposite or did he actually decide that after all this time, Shin-chan gets a break?
Probably nothing quite as simple as either of those options.

Well, I didn't expected to have the scene happening in Paris, hell I didn't expected that the Euro-NERV would have any relevance in the plot (especially after the 14 years time skip), nor did I expected to see the positron canon again (especially as an enemy weapon).
I'm torn between annoyance at seeing the Eiffel Tower get smashed in yet another movie, and laughing out loud at the sheer insanity of using it to ram a fucking building-sizing laser rifle of doom to make it explode (Mari apologizing to Eiffel in French is just the icing on the cake!)

And then there's the revelation that Paris got the Tokyo-3 treatment and is a giant modular city with sections that can rise or sink in the ground is just so batshit crazy that it goes all the way around to hilarious and awesome!

Also, I suppose the fact that of the 6 people in the tower, only the three women get the form-fitting pilot suits of different colors while the three men have all the same orange suit with a form covering vest in top can't be anything else than good old ?

Still, after an entire film trying to reset everything and having it blow up his best friend's head, Shinji's gonna be even more devastated when he'll learn that WILLE already have technology that can restore the world!

FrDougal9000 wrote:Also, I goddamn love Ritsuko wearing her lab coat over the suit. It looks so awesome, and her standing with her arms crossed as she's almost about to be crushed by the Angel before Mari interrupts is the most badass thing I've seen in years.

Am I the only one that thought that she would look really dumb if her lab coat turns to core and encases her?

TB3 wrote:Yeah, did wonder - Japan Unit 2?

What I took away from this was that we're getting more hints on the intervening years. The Wille crew appears to be completing work started (unsucessfully) by others - Maya offers a prayer to those who hoped to save Paris, and the techs state that they're picking up the restart process from Stage 4. They end at Stage 5, so presumable Stages 1-3 had been carried out by the people who started the work.

There's a bit of french written on the bulkhead next to Maya's terminal before she offers her prayer, but its a bit low-res to make out. Anyone got a bead on that?

Edit: it appears to read Je Vons Laisse - I leave you. A goodbye message written by someone about to die?

Maya' screen turns on in with a "RESTART DECRYPTION" with a "Stage Layer Map" at 3, so indeed it looks like they restarted a process that someone else began before :

Also a little later, one of the guys complains that they are making slow progresses, Maya answers "It's an enigma like the Evas. Control through human language isn't easy":

Which for me implies that their "stages" aren't stages of clearing the atmosphere and purifying the land, but to crack the code of the pillar they are on, probably they are a piece of angelic technology (like the spears) that they found somewhere (Black Moon and/or White Mon and/or the Moon) or reproduced from angelic technology they found and barely understand how it works and everything it can do (the lances too showed to be multi-purpose, might be the same for the pillars)

My wild guess is that WILLE's allies in France (probably ex-members of the European branch of NERV) began to work on decrypting the pillars' code and had to abandon the project before the end (maybe all those neo-NERV Evas/fake Angels things), and entrusted the data to the Wunder crew because they have a better chance to finish the job without dying. (hence the message written in French "Je vous laisse"/I leave you)

Arcadia's legacy wrote:Any particular reason the 44B units are using the goose step form of march?

A reference to the Paris Occupation during WWII perhaps? I'm not even joking, since this was originally a Prussian parade marching step, that the German Empire and latter Nazi Germany kept. The reason it spread to many country is because German military advisors spread the tradition to Russia in the 19th century and China during the early 20th century, and later the Soviet Union and PRC advisors spread it to their allies during the Cold War. The Wehrmacht infamously paraded like this on the Champs Elysées after the fall of Paris in 1940.

Electreel wrote:"Deputy Commander Fuyutsuki must be testing us."

Which implies the 4444C and 44B units were sent by nu-Nerv.

They are, you can see neo-NERV's logo on the generators for the positron canon :

Also Ritsuko's line seems to imply that Fuyutsuki is the "general" of neo-NERV's army while Gendo is doing whatever weird crap in the Door of Guf to finalize whatever it's their plans. So in short, old Fuyu is the general Grevious to Gendo's Count Dooku.



Other things I noticed :

The "staircase" shaped building the ball of Mark 44 crashes into at 9:44 is the new Tribunal of Paris, that was finished in 2018 (I passed in front of it everyday in train when I lived in the West of Paris):



The women are wearing plugsuits of the same designs as Asuka's back in 2.0 and the first half of 3.0, but without the "pauldrons" :



The "cloaking "used by the 4444C and its pals has an appearance very similar to the one deployed by the underwater Marks.04C just before attacking the WILLE fleet in 3.0

Kendrix wrote:But I like how she was standing there in the end almost like a commanding presence, certainly someone with a plan, explaining how they'll use the parts etc. - At least she is thinking of recovering the pilots though its intetresting that she names Shinji first, though kinda continues the point that she seems to realize that he's just a young person in way over his head

Is it just me, or does Mari standing there and saying that she is going find Shinji kind of mirror the scene at the beginning of 3.0 where Kaworu is watching Unit-01 falling back to Earth and says that has been waiting for Shinji? Could this parallel be intentional?

I just noticed that the hull of the ships is outfitted with recolored ESV's (Enchanted Shield of Virtue) like the one Rei used in Evangelion 1.0

Kitakami has a "Rei style" one without "boob protectors"
Though given that Mari's move as if she were nakey it does not seem like a plugsuit doubles as a bra, who cares about your back when you gotta save the world i guess

I really like this idea that they're completing the work of their fallen comrades kinda goes well with the general themes of the show


We saw the "angel sealing glyphs" back in the first two movies so it's cool to see them make a comeback. It seems like the French outpost was in charge of decryptic FAR technology & making stuff like the "angel sealing hex pillars"

ElMariachi wrote:Still, after an entire film trying to reset everything and having it blow up his best friend's head, Shinji's gonna be even more devastated when he'll learn that WILLE already have technology that can restore the world!

There's nothing to suggest that it would be permanent. For all we know, it might only last long enough to them to get what they need before it fails and the city turns back to core.

One question, when Mari was firing on those Butterdige machine-type Evas, was she saying "RATTATTATTATTAT" at the same time? If that's true, it would be hillarious.

There is some talk of a time limit and hurrying to fetch the parts

IDK what for tho, also i get the impression they only just got it to work, as with the Wunder WILLE always seems to be improving stuff and who can blame them with such odds

I was confused as hell about the Mark 4 designations in this, but I think I figured it out maybe?

Like the ones in Japan, we have ones called "A", "B", and "C", but now instead of them all just being "4" (4A, 4B, 4C), the designations repeat the "4" in the name based on how many Evas have "combined" to create that unit. For A and B, it's two Evas apiece (A has two faces; B has two bodies), so they're both "44", pronounced "Four-Two". C is made of four Evas, so it's 4444C, "4-Four".

I am also confounded as to why they use "4" in their name when the odds of them being in any way connected to Eva-04's accident -- which I'd thought was maybe a reasonable idea before seeing this scene -- are looking slimmer all the time... EDIT: I take that back; I've actually been further vindicated.

The thread on the subreddit has some interesting information, figured I would collect the best tidbits over here for easy later reference:

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sucaji

Some people were asking what song Mari was singing

It's Suizenji Kiyoko's Shinjitsu Ichiro no March (March of the True Path I guess I would translate it as). Old song, that one.

Here's a performance of it : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mnDd_rOJNAs

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JoshLeaves

[Pastebin Missing some lines at the beginning:

"Paris Assault fleet ready. Descending on Point 0 of the old city."

"All ships, defensive position. Advance slowly from the rear."

"Gravity control, autonomous movement and remote control, all clear."

The "DSRV" is a made-up word, pronounced the same in Japanese, no need for brackets.

The "Light City" is "The city of light", it's Paris's nickname (like "Empire City" for NYC).

When Mari mentions "perpetuate your wishes to save this city", the words written in blood are "Je vous laisse", which is French (duh) for "I leave you".

The line "The end justifies the means" sounds closer (in French) to "To the victor go the spoils".

JoshLeaves

(...) discussed it with a translator friend: the "Je vous laisse" has a better meaning as "I leave it in your hands", with the intent clearly being "someone else was there before".

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Jormungandr419

• The purpose of the mission seems to be restoring the area around the European NERV base at Paris in order to gain access to the spare Eva parts stored there.
  
• The Wunder seems to be what's keeping Unit 08 and the Battleships airborne (you can see the same white light 'strings' holding them up in 3.0 after the Wunder gets airborne).
  
• The enemies seen seem to be at least partly Eva units. Ritsuko mentions them being militarised in a way prohibited by the Vatican Treaty (mentioned in 2.0 as an international treaty designed to stop any one nation having a monopoly on Evangelions).
  
• The aerial units (44A) are apparently more 'wild' for lack of a better term, Ritsuko says they have "formed a colony by themselves" and that they're a new lifeform now.
  
• The faux-Eva units are using a positron cannon, like the one used in 1.0 to kill Ramiel. The larger unit (4444C) has the cannon while the smaller marching units (44B) are carrying generators necessary to power it.
  
• It's mentioned that this attack is "Fuyutsuki testing them" (translation unsure, correct me if the gist is wrong). This would imply Fuyutsuki is mainly in charge of NERV's 'forces' if we can even call them that.
  
• The 44A units have Lances of Longinus' on them, suggesting NERV can manufacture copies, in a similar vein to how the mass produced units in End of Eva each had their own Lances.
  
• The floating Iowa Class Battleships have all been been fitted out with the same shield Rei uses in 1.0 to deflect Ramiel's attack. Slightly unrelated but the ships also seem to have been fitted with torpedo rams, an obscure and pretty useless naval weapn from the late 1800s.

[More on the battleships:]

The battleships we see here are Iowa class battleships, world war 2 ships that served until the 1990s and could still serve today if there was a need for them. As to why they're in WILLE's fleet, in universe their guns and armour would be very useful in the post third impact world where you're fighting angel-eva hybrids every other day. Out of universe, the Eva staff seem to be huge warship buffs so they were probably thrown in for fun, which I can appreciate = )

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oleandersun

I was at the Tokyo showing, so I can't speak for the others, but it appears some scenes were different in different showings. See here for images:

https://twitter.com/yb_ig/status/114750 ... 91008?s=12

Edit: Here's the source for the difference with more images. : https://hobby.dengeki.com/event/797454/

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Zodrex54

Bit of information from before the preview : 50 % of the voicework for the movie is already complete according to Megumi Ogata, she also confirmed that 3.0+1.0 will be the final Rebuild movie.

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Tabisama

It's kinda obvious, but there's another evidence that Mari is actually super old. At some point, she yelled 「あじゃぱー」 which is dead Japanese but was trending among youth and being used in around 1950-70.
[Included for the language tidbit, not for the crazy speculation. -Reichu]

BiskitFoo

「アジャパー 」(how it's supposed to be written) means something along the lines of "wow" or "holy cow.

Just a random thought I had today while running errands - I'm loving how in this post timeskip world the battle is between human specialists and automated labor.
Wille is a bunch of people with different skills who have all come together to achieve a goal while the New NERV has evolved into an automated workforce seemingly devoid of any human workers except the CEO's (Gendo & Fuyutsuki) at the top.
Throw in the Rebuilds heavy focus on the dire need to clean up the damage we've done to the Earth so far which was an element introduced way back in 2.0 with the Ocean Purification Plant and there's a lot to dig into.
The rise of a cheap automated work force replacing people and climate change are two of the most important issues that need to be confronted immediately. Nice to see Anno, the filmmaker behind the only political thriller I can think of to feature a giant lazer beam shooting monster in it, continues to work in political issues into his big sci-fi projects.

Reichu wrote:I was at the Tokyo showing, so I can't speak for the others, but it appears some scenes were different in different showings. See here for images:

https://twitter.com/yb_ig/status/114750 ... 91008?s=12

Looks to me like that's the saturation, brightness and aperture of the cameras recording. I though Midori Kitakami's plugsuit was blue from the initial Livestream but in the following better quality recordings that weren't as dark she's actually wearing a purple plugsuit. The automated Evas are a lime green color but because the Livestream was recording at such dark levels they appear more dark green.

Reichu wrote: [*] The floating Iowa Class Battleships have all been been fitted out with the same shield Rei uses in 1.0 to deflect Ramiel's attack. Slightly unrelated but the ships also seem to have been fitted with torpedo rams, an obscure and pretty useless naval weapn from the late 1800s.[/list]

They are not torpedo rams. Those are part of the ESVs fitted to the hull of the ships.
If you see this image you'll notice that the "torpedo ram" is in fact the base of the shield, which is pointing towards the bow of the ship. Another one can be seen near the ship's rudder, because the ESV is pointing in the opposite direction astern.

Gendo'sPapa wrote:Looks to me like that's the saturation, brightness and aperture of the cameras recording. I though Midori Kitakami's plugsuit was blue from the initial Livestream but in the following better quality recordings that weren't as dark she's actually wearing a purple plugsuit. The automated Evas are a lime green color but because the Livestream was recording at such dark levels they appear more dark green.

There's this response repudiating it, but I don't have an opinion one way or the other:

Sefsef_BJ

Hi, French guy who was almost front row watching it, the color calibration of the screen had no problems and the resolution was so much better than what's on the livestream; can confirm the design was green, the footage definitely is different from the one aired at Shinjuku