Coming back to this thread after seeing the latest trailer... I seem to have missed this post earlier:
Yeah, after seeing the visuals for myself:
...I immediately came to the conclusion that the red Evas are Tokyo-3 residents that evolved right where they were standing, as well. (Which isn't too far removed from the guess I made with just dialogue and a vague description of the visuals alone.) There are mutilated corpses and everything -- even the dead appear to have been transformed where they stood.
Though, either not everybody got transformed, or Tokyo-3 is a pretty empty city, eh?
The weirdest thing to me is that they're covered in armor plating. Weird pylons and everything. This doesn't particularly make sense. I mean... why would a mystical artificial evolution process automatically deck you out in the stuff that, we've observed, have to be manufactured and affixed by teams of technicians? (Cf.: Mark.06 on the Moon.) It's not as if Anno and company have some kind of built-in aversion to big naked artificial gods, as the short prefacing the movie demonstrates. So... why?
Not to mention, why are they (and everything else, for that matter) all red?
And unveiled to us poor gaijin suckers in the same trailer... What the fuck is this?
As I understand, it's something that's pulled up from below the Tokyo-3 ruins during Fourth Impact, but... yeah. The hell?