What a freaking movie. So many twists and turns. Absolutely intense from start to finish.

It's not great by any means, but it's a pretty good movie that didn't leave me filled with regret for investing time in it.

what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

Actress is magnificent and exudes a hypnotic screen presence in this affecting drama.

I was really impressed with the 2nd film. It gave a refreshing new take on the events and characters from the classic original series and I was excited to see where they were going to take it. The new interactions between Rei and Shinji were especially fascinating and touching to me. Strong character development throughout the film drew me into the story and had the world feeling rich and deep. By the end I was so invested I was on the edge of my seat and the final Angel battle left me with goose bumps.So with high hopes I began watching the 3rd film.Oh man what a jarring experience! After a flashy action sequence Shinji and the audience are ruthlessly thrown into a confusing, cold and alien new reality. All of the growth from the previous film has been shat on and flushed down the toilet.By the end of the film Shinji was complaining about how he had no idea what the hell was going on. You and me both brother.Edit: I've watched the film a second time and found it more enjoyable but still a bit much. Its more of an experience than anything else. The 4th and final part has the gargantuan task of bringing it all together and I'm worried they wont have room for anything else other than exposition. The creators really must have massive balls to write themselves into such a hole.

Seriously, what happened? I enjoyed Evangelion 1.0 and loved it's sequel, but in the third installment of the Rebuilt saga, something went wrong. The plot is everywhere, sometimes straight up and the next second some sort of really weird metaphor (if there's a metaphor and no just some random thing that they thought it could make the movie look "smarter"). The characters have absolutely no built up, when in the first one Shinji became a cool character by the end and, in 2.0, Asuka developed her personality in a majestic way.The only couple of things I can save from this movie are the soundtrack, which is glorious and the piano scene. The rest was a bunch of semi-well done action scenes with too much CGI and... red.By the way, I apologize for any misspelling.

I came into this movie cautiously yet with an open mind. After having seen the pure awe inspiring madness that was Evangelion 2.22, I hadn't realized that the third installment had already been out for a while. I was excited to see it but desired to watch it in English when it came out with the stunning visuals of a BD release. A combination of a weak will, impatience, and curiosity for the negativity it was receiving lead me to stream it with the English subtitles.Needless to say, my reactions towards the film were probably the same as every other seasoned Eva fanboy or girl. With the exception of the first 5 or so minutes of the film, I never found one instance where I wouldn't swear at my monitor and choke back tears of disappointment. It was a familiar almost nostalgic feeling, it was like re-watching the entire series and then remembering the dismal final two episodes. This fascination lead me to re-watch the film a second and even a third time. With each successive viewing, I realized that this is what Eva was all about. Besides a lot of MAJOR details that Anno decided to throw in probably just to remind his fanbase of the contempt he has for them, it was actually a fairly satisfying movie.However, these flaws are too major to miss. The movie thrusts not only Shinji but the viewers as well into an almost alien environment. It is this confusion and deep feeling of disorientation that the film thrives off of. Anno succeeded in making his fans empathize for Shinji. However, this is both a strength and a downfall of the film. While it is nice to see Shinji progress as a character farther than he ever would have in the series, it is also only backed up by the fact that nobody at WILLE or even NERV decides to fill him in as to what had happened during the past 14 years. If WILLE would have just told Shinji what had happened and what he had caused instead of ostracizing him and treating him as a weapon, more than two thirds of the movie would have been scrapped. Another common complaint was the radical change in the personalities of most if not all the characters we had grown to know and love from NGE. As it is known as a Rebuild series, I wasn't incredibly unprepared but it was admittedly off putting at times. For the most part, I really only had two problems with WILLE (and I say only WILLE because they are the center of these character complaints). The first is the wasted opportunity in revealing more about Mari Makinami. She had fulfilled her job satisfyingly in Evangelion 2.22 by not revealing too much to the audience but at the same time making a grandiose entrance into the world of Eva. In 3.33, her screen time is nil. She remains the same enigmatic and methodical pilot she was in 2.22. The second problem I had comes from the fact that the characters are not only incredibly different but one dimensional. In NGE most EVERY character was complex and had layers the viewers had to dig through in order to merely scratch the surface of what they were all about. 3.33 denies these characters this complexity that made viewers anxious to see the next episode of NGE (not trying to say I am not thoroughly excited for Evangelion Final). All of WILLE with the exception of Sakura Suzuhara can easily be described in less than a sentence. They are all unprecedentedly angry at Shinji for causing Third Impact for a SELFLESS reason that he had no idea would have consequences. However, this ties back to one of the strengths the movie had, it setup a bond between the viewer and Shinji.The final problem I had with the movie (is actually kind of minor) is the convoluted mess that is the Evangelion storytelling. Anno will throw in new plot elements left and right in the show, but in 3.33's case, I would be relieved when I got a 10 minute break from all these new plot elements and terms. But, without giving in to the will of the movie, it was actually a lot more simple of a film than people give it credit for. Anno is not the kind of person to give people answers, at least not until the end. And if he doesn't give us answers we usually just fill in the blanks ourselves. Considering this is (Not) the last movie, we still have plenty of time to receive the answers we so desire.All these points aside, the film succeeds in areas the original series didn't. For one, Kaworu is no longer an underwhelming and shoehorned character. The relationship between him and Shinji is stronger than ever and in many ways, it was a lot better done than it was in the show. But this relationship is overall the main point of the movie. And that can be a problem for some. If you don't like Shinji or Kaworu as an Evangelion fan, you probably aren't going to enjoy the movie. It is very much Shinji's movie.Overall, 3.33 left me with the same amount of confusion and suffering that The End of Evangelion left me with (I too had to re-watch that to fully appreciate it). But if you are willing to stick through to the end and take the movie at face value, you really should be fine. As a person who has re-watched Evangelion more times than they can count, I can fully say that this movie had a similar tone to the latter half of the series. 3.33 is the closest thing we are going to get to that feeling, it is a very dark movie. If you are a fan of NGE or the Rebuilds, THIS IS A MUST WATCH!

The first two "rebuilds" of Evangelion crammed twenty episodes of the 1995 Shin Seiki Evangelion TV series into a span of three and a half hours, upping the musical and animation ante every explosive step of the way. Three years later, Evangelion 3.0 showed such promise: A teaser trailer so confident that it revealed only the internal workings of a piano; previews of an eyepatched Asuka spiraling through space with a shield and massive rifle to soul-rousing operatic strains. Yet after all the fervent build-up, Eva 3.0 feels like one of those reboots where a project was taken over by people who never understood why the franchise had rabid fans in the first place. Creator Hideaki Anno is still at the helm—and even back in the director's chair—yet when the film is over, the subtitle "You Can (Not) Redo" feels, more than anything, like an apology.Anno opens with Asuka and Mari deploying multi-stage booster rockets, high-powered sniper rifles, massive shields and a brand-new pink Eva to fight off an Angel while retrieving Shinji and Unit 01 from Earth orbit. The sequence is brilliant, operatic, even tear-inducing: Then Shinji wakes up in yet another intensive care unit and the roller-coaster ride crashes straight into a ditch from which it will never emerge.In 1997's the End of Evangelion, Shinji was offered a world in which he could merge with all of humanity so that he would never again have to feel alone. In Eva 3.0, he is offered a different world—one in which no demands are made of him at all. Enter ninety minutes of nothing.This is not like what Anno did when he ran out of budget for the animated series, when he drove fans berserk by throwing out all the robot rumbles to dive into the characters' psyches for the last two episodes. Eva 1995 was all about the characters, putting broken human beings in a world-on-the-brink environment with the idea that their most intense struggles would still be to be loved, cherished, and accepted for who they were. Eva 3.0 strips away both the characters and the environmental crucible, even eliminating the deeper question of why everything is happening, and leaves us only with the hum-drum intellectual exercise of finding out what happened.Shinji awakes into what is essentially the set of Das Boot melded with the bridge of the Macross. Misato is captain of a giant whale-like flying ark called the Wunder, the Nerv command crew man her bridge, and the cast is rounded out by a trio of space opera stock characters who get more lines than all the old cast combined. Even Mari, who had 'dark impending purpose' written all over her introduction in Eva 2.0, turns out to be nothing more than Asuka's sharp-shooting, one-liner-dropping sidekick. And despite the Third Impact having begun just to save her, when we finally meet Rei, she has no memory of the event and no connection to Shinji—or anyone else—whatsoever.It turns out that the Third Impact was aborted part-way, and Shinji has been fitted with a Battle Royale-style choker designed to pop off his head if he shows any sign of becoming a deity again. While for a time it seems that we have been immersed in an alternate-universe Eva redesigned as a space opera, it is actually fourteen years later, and all the character dynamics that brought fans to the series have withered and died away. Rei, Asuka and Misato speak so little it's as if they aren't even there, and even Shinji doesn't wallow in self-pity; he is confused by all the changes, but with all the characters so different, the emotional boil we would normally expect to see at this stage of the series simply cannot emerge.Having achieved friendship and affection in Eva 2.0, Shinji is much better adjusted than in his television iteration, and when he is whisked away from the Wunder to meet Kaworu, he's not desperate for approval—he just wants to know what's going on. Separated from all the people who cared about him, Shinji wanders through the hollowed-out remains of Nerv headquarters playing piano with Kaworu, stacking books for Rei and playing shogi with Fuyutsuki. And if that sounds about as exciting as a lazy Sunday afternoon, then you can imagine just how agonizing the middle hour of the movie becomes. By the time Kaworu outlines what Shinji could do to fix the world, there's just no reason to care. While there's an attempt to create drama over whether Kaworu's late-emerging MacGuffin will actually bring a 'fix' or the Fourth Impact doesn't really matter—from the audience's perspective, either change would be welcome. Even Ode to Joy can do nothing to elevate an Eva-on-Eva battle when there's no longer anything significant at stake.Aside from the opening, the most exciting part of Rebuild of Evangelion 3.0: You Can (Not) Redo may be the pre-film. In what is perhaps a dark parody of Pixar, the movie begins with a short film by Studio Ghibli showing the arrival of Nausicaa's God Warriors in Tokyo. Although inexplicably completed using people tromping around a miniature city in creepy God Warrior suits, the piece, narrated by the voice of Ayanami Rei (Megumi Hayashibara), is unusually grim and captivating.