Chuckman wrote:I'd be satisfied with something other than "attention nerds: go outside, talk to people" the motion picture. Again. You made that point, Anno. Say something else.
He already abandoned that battle a long time ago, he said it explicitly in interviews, so it's clear that NTE doesn't want to give that kind of message.
Personally, I think that Anno wants to be more "classical" this time, with a classic story of the hero's journey to defeat a great threat and save the land.
In NGE the plot about protecting the world, defeating the Angels, the giant robots... were just a background, means for the true purpose of the series: a character studies centered around the need of self-acceptance and to take the risk to form emotional bonds with people, hedgehog dilemma be damned.
And this background took more and more a backsit as the series neared its end, with EoTV completely stopping to pretend that the story was about saving the world to go into full therapy mode, EoE giving us just more context and an epilogue. (and an absolutely kickass fight scene for Asuka!
)
But in NTE I get the feeling that we're going the reverse way: 1.0 and 2.0 had many scenes were the characters were introspecting: Shinji and his doubts, Rei and her musings about how she thanked Shinji but never Gendo, Asuka's "talk" with her doll, then with Shinji and finally with Misato, even the scenes where the secondary characters where talking together (mainly Misato and Ritsuko) mainly talk about how are the pilots, their motivations and how they changed. The only scenes completely devoted to the plot (Angels, Lilith's covenant, the HIP, the "Cold War" between SEELE and NERV) are with Gendo and Fuyutsuki and when they have a reunion with SEELE.
So at first glance it looks like it'll be like NGE, a character study using giant robots, Angels and technobabble as the setting in the background. And then comes 3.0, and everything is turned on its head: the state of the world is thrown at Shinji's (and ours) face, and take the central attention. We don't have any scene of Shinji musing about if he tries to understand people and their motives, or the Hedgehog Dilemma, no Hell Train scenes, the main plot is "the world is wrecked, and we need to save it", the closest we have to introspection is Kaworu's observations about Shinji's personality when they were stargazing and during their piano session, and even that was revealed to be mainly a training in pilot synchronization for the more down to Earth objective to breach Lilith Chamber and accomplish his plan.
And all the others characters casted aside their personal motivations to concentrate on the world around: no more Misato fighting the Angels to avenge his father and "get to know him more", no more Asuka piloting for the praise, no more Mari piloting because it's fun (although from her POV it's obviously still the best thing on the world), now everyone is focused on defeating neo-NERV and SEELE and save the world.
Even for Shinji that was the case: his motivations was to repair the world not finding his purpose, even if part of his motivation was to be forgiven by everyone, but that's being human.
That's why I think that FINAL will be more centered on the fight against Gendo and saving the world than Shinji and his introspections. There will be some of course, notable to get him out of his funk and start to hope again, but the main story will be WILLE and its fight to prevent Instrumentality (with Shinji joining the fight, or not)
I mainly base this theory on an interview of Anno from the last year where he said that he realized that his formula from NGE, of a story centered around a character and his state of mind with the setting just used as a background and tool to explore said character's state of mind, was largely copied during the past years, to the point that stories of "Tales", where we have a large cast of character and the story is centered around them accomplishing something great together (think
Legend of Galactic Heroes) became very rare, to his dismay, and that he wanted to make a "Tale" with the hope to make the genre popular again. So maybe the shift in 3.0 is an expression of this desire: we stop being focused on what's in Shinji's head, to focus on what's happening around him. Maybe that was what Asuka means by telling to him that he always only think of himself: "stop the navel gazing and look at the big picture, and that begins by listening to other people, even if what they have to say is contrary to what you believe!" (although she didn't made many efforts to communicate and be listened by him, unless guttural berserker screams became a common language in the past 14 years!
)