On Getting the most out of the Shin/Redbuild series

[Darth Plato]

OK, I finally watched the rebuilds.

Conclusion: they were OK. Flawed, and in some ways not as good as they could have been, but I am glad I saw them.

Just musing about what is good about them and how to fit it all in.

I feel like a person would be lost without having seen the whole original series and EoE. Everything the characters did fit into a context of my knowing the characters already, and it was an exploration of those same characters (with the exception of Mari and other minor new characters).

I wanted to see it as an alternate direction things took when Shinji "rebuilt" the world, although that apparently isn't the majority or "real" interpretation.

The rebuild brought some genuine chuckles--from knowing the characters already--and some genuine frustration. It was pretty excruciating being clueless along with Shinji when he woke up. And then when he moped for the first half of the last film.

Although some aspects are "bad" to me... for instance, Mari is a confusing character who also happens to be annoying, despite having an important role in spinning events and character development, I had no idea why she was the way she was. How did she get that way and how old is she even? She couldn't be age frozen from the time of Shinji's parents, because there were no evangelions yet. At least I came out a little confused, but she seems to be actually older and acts a little older. But I found her obnoxious and weird, although I was hoping to get more development from this absurd new wild card in the story. Additionally it gets over the top verging on becoming silly in the end although it was effectively creepy.

As I was saying though, I want to focus on what is good in the story and what it ADDS to Eva. It does weirdly make the original seem old and incomplete. But honestly, it gave me things I wanted for the characters and resolved (in my view) certain sort of emotional cliffhangers. If there really is a cycle of recurrence (and I think there is) then we can see this as the universe that gives effective therapy to our heroes (and even villains, since Gendo is undeniably that by the end of it all) so that a more positive message is here. It is a long the lines of--what if these characters had simply been a little more supportive and loving to each other? What difference would it make? The answer apparently is, a lot.

The scene where Toji tells Shinji how he dealt with guilt and responsibility was a good one.

Again though I don't think this series makes ANY SENSE AT ALL except as a counterpoint or foil to the original. I think a person beginning with the rebuilds would be hard put to have a sense of what is going on, let alone appreciate any of its significance. And at times I wasn't sure what a newcomer would even be aware of or when or if they would get it.

I am grateful these were made, though at times it just made me want to go back to the original.

Finally I will mention my general feeling that most of the live-action shots mixed with anime or not and the CGI stuff was not that great. And the other main issues were silliness at the end (angel blood, really) and the fact that despite her critical role and importance fostering the positivity that is the real twist in the new series, Mari was just kind of obnoxious and annoying....sort of off-putting to me, especially when she first meets Shinji.

But I really did enjoy it and I did not want to stop. I watched eight and a half hours of it straight, until 2:30 in the morning. Just like when I watched the original, I kept wanting a little more. And I do think it takes known Chess pieces if you will and allows a deeper exploration.

Last thing, I think the end allows evageeks to free themselves from Eva when they are ready. I am glad I got the eva therapy but I suspect it is not needed by everyone....

[Weird_ocean]

Last thing, I think the end allows evageeks to free themselves from Eva when they are ready. I am glad I got the eva therapy but I suspect it is not needed by everyone....

It is always weird to me when people say that the Rebuild movies were the closure they needed for the series and EOE. I got the opposite of closure. I guess casual viewers don't really care either way. (not saying you are) Good vibes and a happy ending are enough.

But for me, EVA was really a very intimate thing. Watching the original for the first time in 2005, I never engaged in any online discussions or forums. I got my closure with EOE; it was the perfect, beautiful, powerful, weird, and brutally honest conclusion of the perfect story. So, although these characters stayed in my heart, I could move on. I didn't need to know every secret; I didn't need to find out what happened after the EOE beach scene. "They will figure it out," I thought.

Two decades later in 2024, I watched the Rebuilds, and at first I was like you. "Yeah, they are OK, definitely not as good as the original, but they have some good moments." But there was a problem. They were not good enough on their own, but at the same time, they were so insanely convoluted to the point of not being coherent that I had to find out for myself what the hell had even happened in those movies. Especially Shin Evangelion. I never needed to do that with the original; I never read the wiki. The show and the movie were so good that trying to know it even better seemed unnecessary. I actually preferred to keep many things a mystery because it was like touching something special and holy: I didn't want the magic of it gone.

But the Rebuilds were much worse than the original. The magic was no longer there. Many elements were added to it that simply were white noise, a distraction, fanservice nonsense. And Mari is extremely annoying. And so I started with the wikis, the forums, Reddit, and the videos. And I didn't find the answers that I needed. Then I rewatched all 4 movies again very carefully. I needed to find out what the hell all of this was about.

And I found out that it doesn't really mean anything. That the mysteries and the obscured facts are just there to make it Evangelion-like, instead of trying to tell a story or make it genuine. And most elements of the lore, the universe, and sci-fi buzzwords were never explained or explored. It was a trail that led to a dead end. Relationships between important characters like Asuka, Kensuke, Shinji, and Mari simply were not established. We know almost nothing about them. And it caused me to be in a constant loop of rumination about them. It was an anti-closure. The story where we simply don't know anything about anyone, but still pretend like we do, is the worst one.

The opposite of closure is what I got. The closure that is not earned, that is cheap and unsatisfying, is what I got. In that moment, I understood that I'm different from the majority of people who watch anime, and probably different from the majority of EVA fans. I never needed more content. I never read the manga. I was content with what I had. But I believed in Anno. That was a mistake.

Rebuild is a remake gone wrong, where each setup is abandoned for a new one that is then abandoned again. And it is incredibly frustrating if you ever cared about the lore and these characters, and not just vibed with it.

My advice would probably be: if you actually want to understand the lore of the Rebuild, don't. It gets more and more unsatisfying the more you find out.

[Axx°N N.]

Everything about Rebuild is a contradiction and paradox to me, and I'm usually into those but oh well.

I've never understood the need to see the characters unambiguously happy ... and the paradox part of that is that I disagree that Rebuild even does that. It exclaims that they are and it vocalizes transcendence, epiphany, apotheosis, actualization, etc., but I don't think merely stating these things is the same as them persisting or really being the case, and I don't think they're conveyed in the way film ideally would convey these states. It's pretty insane to compare EoE's instrumentality and Shin's. EoE uses montage to great effect, and it feels like it has a real grasp for what can and can't be done with words and drawings alone. But then in Shin it's endless expository talking scenes where the characters are stymied by their stiff expressions, and shorthand of teardrops doesn't go the distance.

Another paradox is that to more fully understand Rebuild, because it's essentially (or eventually) an i-novel, is knowledge of Anno as a person is paramount. Except ... the more interviews I read, and the more I understand Rebuild as being representative of Anno, the more I view certain elements as clashing with the elements that are there for other reasons. There's no one consistent lens in which to view why certain things exist in Rebuild, and the magic spell an audio-visual piece of art is supposed to cast gets broken when you realize the nitty-gritty production reasons. There are some things I'm so obsessive about that I know nearly all the background detail, and yet it still retains its magic because the end product stands on its own. But with Rebuild, the more I know the more I see competing intentions fighting for runtime. The changes in the end goal are well-documented and well known, in that the premise of the film series changes between each entry, but the effect is like being in a car with someone who's never driven, you lurch forward, you brake too hard, start and stop and then you hit a stop sign.

In some ways, I think one might actually benefit not only with knowing nothing of Anno, but of never having watched the originals. I imagine certain elements could be, in isolation, more novel or impressively confounding.

And yet in other ways, there's certainly elements that can't possibly work on their own and probably fall flatter than they do vs. when you've seen the original, except after you've seen the original now other areas of Rebuild fall flat in the inevitable backwards-comparison.

Paradoxically, Rebuild is consumed with expunging its characters and liberating the maker and audience from Eva ... except that would have been accomplished already had they never been made, because people would have been forced to reconcile and understand the material that existed, just like any other story. It's not a tragic thing or bad outcome that, like, Persona (the Bergman film) still illicits analysis.

A lot of people make a lot out of Eva being an anti-otaku work, and that Rebuild is 'course-correcting' the original which didn't put enough of that to bed. Except then why reward otaku with camera angles that are so lecherous, it looks like they're about to turn into a proctology feed? It goes without saying that I disagree that was ever really a concern of the production. I think that the original intent, the straight-laced remake, was monetarily driven (which is stated in interviews...) and then as production continued, there was felt a need for more of a justification that that. In many ways, I think Shin is the result of something wrestling with the necessariness of its own existence, and making moves to counter self-doubt. But in the end, that means a lot of it comes across as insecurity-driven coping mechanisms.

The paradoxical toxicity of those who grokked the happy ending, the phenomenon of online arguments where those who liked Shin accuse those who didn't of 'needing to touch grass,' is really illuminating to me. If the overall messaging really is 'move on already!' it almost feels like a DARVO technique. The original expressed this message in a resonant way through a character arc. But when Shin says it, it almost feels like the real motivation is an attempt to argue that film criticism is somehow spiritually retrograde. 'Look over there, away from my failings. And if you don't, you suck.'

Of course, even though we all like to think of ourselves as statues unmoved by the greater forces around us, both installments of Eva are, in many ways, testaments to their times. The original came out in a period of malaise, uncertainty, and the sense that the turn of the millennium could be terrifying but might, in the end, be a needed tabula rasa. Shin, on the other hand, feels completely unmoored and at odds with itself--and of course, our present moment is fractious and defined (or more like, plagued) by failures to reconcile endless contradiction.

[Darth Plato]

I'm not sure I feel misunderstood, but to be clear I was just laying out the ways in which I could get something out of the new material or find some value in it. As a fan *though not as deep of one as some* it just seemed to me that at least some of it had value, or that the totality had a value of sorts. But I think I was clear about there being things I didn't like, and I won't try to itemize them further.

To me it could be read as a sort of commentary on the original. There were for me some fan service type of wish fulfilments--here I mean gratifying a fan's wish to see something, like adult versions of the classmates who disappear in the original.

I don't know. I liked certain things. So my point is that fans can choose to focus on the positive, even if we prefer to see EoE as the "real" ending. Incoherent as that lore may have been, it was more coherent than the rebuilds.

I just confess I found "value" of a sort in the new films, not that I consider them necessary or superior. They offend me less than the Star Wars sequel trilogy, which verged on a reboot and---let me interrupt myself, you probably don't want me to talk about it.

P.S. I had the same initial solution as one of the other posters here to the original. I figured that in the new world, Shinji and Asuka would somehow come to terms with their relationship. On rewatching, I actually find her final line comedic. In the words of the other poster--they'll figure it out.

[asakuraikun]

First, the good things. I think one the nicest things that came out of Rebuild was that it gave us a lot of things to discuss, and it was quite a journey. It made Evangelion be something more than just a classic old show that people discuss theories online. There were things to speculate now! That surely was interesting at the time.

The movies are generally very well animated, it has nice visuals that a weekly show hardly can have compared to a movie. The CGI parts are indeed a bit off, and sometimes it contrasts with the overall quality of the animation. It sure is disappointing, I always prefer normal animation over CGI, but the rest of the animation is quite good.

Now, I think that the main question I have when I go to Evangelion media other than the original (or EoE) is - "If this was the only Evangelion thing to ever exist, would it be nearly as relevant?". The answer for the manga (which I like) is no. The answer for the Rebuilds is also no. I don't think neither have what made the original so relevant and so discussed after all these years, neither of them have something so unique that they can be something of their own.

The narrative of the Rebuilds is a hit-or-miss. Some characters feel much more hollow than those we originally knew. The way Rebuild tries to remediate this is by going deep just a few times. Rei and Shinji relationship is indeed a high point, and 3.0 is a whole movie to Shinji and Kaworu. As most people mentioned Mari is hard to explain, and although she eventually finds its function into the plot, for most of time she was just... there. Sometimes I feel that Rebuild always has to do a lot more to reach something that the originals did masterfully with a lot less.

About the directing, the overall quality is very good, because Anno is a very good director - but I have to mention that the only movie I consider masterful in direction is 2.0. The others are well directed, but I wouldn't personally put on my favourite list of Anno's works.

I enjoyed the movies more when I rewatched them all, but I think it hardly changes most things I said.

edit: spelling

[marchon]

The opposite of closure is what I got. The closure that is not earned, that is cheap and unsatisfying, is what I got. In that moment, I understood that I'm different from the majority of people who watch anime, and probably different from the majority of EVA fans. I never needed more content. I never read the manga. I was content with what I had. But I believed in Anno. That was a mistake.

Rebuild is a remake gone wrong, where each setup is abandoned for a new one that is then abandoned again. And it is incredibly frustrating if you ever cared about the lore and these characters, and not just vibed with it.

My advice would probably be: if you actually want to understand the lore of the Rebuild, don't. It gets more and more unsatisfying the more you find out.

Well said.

I regret watching the rebuilds. I find the final two films mostly boring, and don't believe much in Anno anymore as a creator. Perhaps the films would have been better if Satsukawa had stayed involved and tempered things a bit, as he wrote some of the best episodes of NGE.

[BernardoCairo]

I never read the manga.

You should. It's funny.
It doesn't even come close to the quality of the original series, and the ending is quite weak. However, it doesn't have the weight of being THE sequel to Evangelion, so it's easier to simply enjoy it for what it is. I love volumes 4 and 6.
I agree with you that no extra content was ever needed.