wandercreature

Had been putting this one off for the kind of time and bandwidth needed to finally digest it, and unfortunately it's pretty much everything I feared it would be.

Visually strong, but so far up its own ass that it ends up designating the entire Rebuild concept to KY Jelly status.

With the original series, the enemy/obstruction was growing up and perpetuating the awfulness of our previous generations.

With Rebuild, the enemy/obstruction is Anno's indifference.

Again, another case of being given all the toys, but no clue as to what to do with all of them. The finale ends up being less a functional dramatic piece of work, and more a grand canvas to get out years of latent, unrealized ideas whether or not it tells a story or evokes an emotion. In the end, Rebuild is little more than an increasingly overwrought rag more interested in fan service and fetishism to the point that it all feels pretty perfunctory and without much left to say. Twenty four years after The End of Evangelion (1997), it's pretty clear that whatever personal turmoil led to the epoch making confessional that is the original series has come around, and it isn't terribly interested in anything outside of objects. The once very compelling character landscape of NGE is now pure spectacle with nothing driving it all but fleeting baubles of interest. Despite all its incredible production muscle, the entire affair is an inert one punctuated by assumptions of depth.

For me there is no sensitivity to incident which is to say that nothing really breathes, which is what I need for moments to build and deliver. There is a lot thrown at us, but those aren't really scenes. Rather they are wildly complex ideas and opportunities for animators to strut their best, but with no authentic purpose outside of how cool it might be. It's something that pervades the Rebuilds, but it is in overdrive here to the point that I felt nothing for anything or anyone.

Worse yet, it's clear that Anno has only learned the wrong things since the original series. The conclusion he comes to here is so backward, so toxic, that it's hard to believe it was written by the same person. If anything, it kind of taints the original if these feelings were always at the back of his mind. That, or marriage and life beyond has rendered him into something the opposite of what made the original so powerful to me.

The fact that it's now all about objects and incident without humanity is the wrong kind of depressing. It decides that the finale of Gunbuster with its Black Hole Bomb was infinitely more interesting than the choices pilots were making or exploring. Give an artist everything they could possibly want, and the end product might be telling of their deepest intentions.

This is another one of those "careful what you wish for" moments. Sure, the original "End" was an emotionally overwhelmed and deeply angry mess, but at least it was a vulnerable, honest mess.

1997 presented us with the Shinji outcome.

3.0 + 1.0 is the Gendo outcome.