BusterMachine4 wrote:Well, 2.0 was clearly supposed to be a "set up a false hope only to crush it" sort of movie, plan or no plan: the switch to a darker tone and more serious story happens within the movie itself.
True, but I've always found that the Near-Third Impact scene is still framed with that false hope, obscuring its horror. Audiences (understandably) did not seem to comprehend the implications of what was happening (just like Shinji).
BusterMachine4 wrote:But I don't quite comprehend why Anno would make a trailer for 3.0 if he knew everything in it was going to be a lie. I mean, he marketed the trailer as a preview for 3.0, and he even changed it to make it more accurate when the TV version of 2.0 was released. I think it's clearly a preview for a rough draft of 3.0 that never ended up materializing, not some sort of intentional false advertising.
But not everything in the preview is a "lie". In fact, I personally feel like it could be considered canon to some degree. Nothing in it contradicts 3.0 and plenty of it tracks. I know I'm kind of making the case for Gigabrain Anno here, but think about it - the preview essentially serves as a primer for what happens in-between 2.0 and 3.0. Updating it to make it more accurate makes sense. If Anno really had made such a radical change in direction during production, I'd expect the outdated preview to be at complete odds with the film, not actively helpful for understanding it.
Also, just to clarify, I think Rebuild is great regardless of whether the timeskip was planned early or not. If anything, I'd be very impressed that the films play off each other as well as they do if such radical changes to the core themes and ideas were being made along the way. I just think it's more likely that the basic structure (close remake -> loose remake -> timeskip -> new ending) was already planned out.