It's totally awesome, I don't know what movie he watched.
Well, I didn't completely hate it, I guess, but it was a mess, and one that wasn't particularly fun or interesting to watch. I mean, I watched 2.22 like six times. I fucking love that movie. I can't imagine I'll watch 3.0 again, though. If 2.0 had all of my favorite aspects of Eva rolled into one movie, 3.0 has all my least favorite.
(Spoilers below)
Again, the first third's pretty promising. I like where all the characters ended up, the ragtag navy of survivors is sort of cool, and the eva redesigns are nice (the half-Angel Unit 00 in particular, but I also dug how the Unit 02 apparently can't get new limbs grown, now that they're divorced from Nerv, so she's been swapping out robotic ones). Gendo's army of half-grown evalings are a great element, too; I like the idea that by this point, he's gone past deterring the Angels and is now just growing his own. Misato running her own splinter group is great too, especially since they're probably the last humans on Earth at this point.
That said, the action scenes are flashy but few and blah overall. Things spin and flip and explode, but it's hard to follow and are weirdly low-stakes. You never get the sense they are in actual danger, really. The Willie flying ship is just... really, really out of place in this universe. It feels straight out of Eureka 7, or some Gainax show about air pirates they had half-developed. Besides that great scene where they boot up the S2 engine, gone are the vast modern-tech engineering feats they've had to pull off in the past to go toe to toe with the Angels. Here they point their flying ship at the thing, and fire a barrage of LASER CANNONS until it explodes. It feels like a joke, maybe? Like this is something some third-tier knockoff Eva series would try?
I can't fault it for being radically different, because I'd much rather that than something like 1.0, which was fairly dull until that last battle. But it feels like a completely different, weirdly generic anime, complete with standard bridge crew and non-strategies relying on raw bravado and luck to pull through. That fits for Gurren, but one of the things I love about Eva is that they've never left a single fucking thing to chance if they could help it. They have a plan for every concievable contingency, and they try everything they can before it comes down to the pilot. If Gendo had gotten the dummy plug to work like he'd hoped, they'd be out of the equation too. Granted, there's something cool about them no longer have the luxury of a nation's resources to stave off the end of the world, but it loses something grandiose in the process. You got the sense the entire planet and her resources were devoted to making sure the Eva project worked.
We get some decent answers after they visit Nerv, like the nature of Seele and the necessary backstory about Shinji's mother and Rei's clones, but it's all so empty and morbid and dark that it grinds the story to a halt as he takes in the various sights of Nerv's unguarded secrets and the ruined planet, one after the other. The new hellscape is cool, visually, the rows of crosses in particular, but it's almost too alien to be quite as unsettling as in the past. One thing I liked about Eva's setting was that there are all these things very, nightmarishly wrong with their world, but people still attempt to go about their day with some normalcy. The seas are red and empty of life, but there's still boats floating around and little plants devoted to cycling the dead water. There's huge sections of the original city
left to decay, and unexplainable
cornered off areas like this, but people still go to work every day. Their entire city sinks into the ground, because sometimes it has to be a battleground, and the next day
cleanup crews roll out to scrub the monolithic walls of blood off of their building. The lengths mankind goes to in order to keep on living are unsettling and fascinating. Was sad to see that go in favor of wide, general devastation.
I suppose the Eva redesigns you see along the way are cool - in general, all the designs are as well-done as ever - but I got the sense they were just pumping out variations to sell figures or whatever. You'd only see each kind of design for a bit before it morphed into something else, or left, or exploded. The Mark 09 from the moon is never shown in action, for all the buildup to its lunar excavation and outfitting. In its place are several new Evas I struggle to remember, considering how erratic they were and how briefly they remained.
The last battle is bizarre, too. Everyone spins around and shoots at each other in a frenzy of desperation, things explode, and Seele's incomprehensible plan is foiled. By the end, nothing has really changed but that they got the three pilots together again. That would've been fine if the fight had been particularly good, but it was dark, confusing, and sort of low-stakes? You knew they weren't going to cause the Third Impact, so why did they make that the centerpiece of the finale?
I'll see the last part, of course, because I've come this far, but going off the preview, I really hope they're not going to stick around Tokyo-03. The location is dead and I don't really see what they could find exploring it. Likely, they'll go to the big moon screw thingie, and we'll get some more details about the Angels, which are this point aren't quite as mysterious now that everything they might have tried, they already have.
That said, I talked to feem about it online a couple days ago, and he mentioned that it's possible this all could still fit into the repeating-universe theory. Kaworu's plan seemed different this time than in the show, where instead triggering the Third Impact, he just wanted to help out Shinji. When he got there, things weren't as he expected, and the plan collapsed, telling Shinji he'd see him again before he saved his life. Consider how he keeps mentioning that he'll get it right "this time", he might show up again during the next iteration of the world. That might be cool, but I'm not holding my breath that the finale will be anywhere near that well-planned.
