Evangelion 2.0 You Can (Not) Advance

This is the first of three reviews of films I caught at the BFI’s Anime Weekend. They run the weekend every couple of years and it’s well worth paying attention to as you’ll get a chance to see films you won’t at UK anime conventions (i.e. Mind Game in 2006, The Girl Who Leapt Through Time in 2008).

Boy, oh boy, were there ever some nerds in the audience for this one. Possible the most heightened air of nerd excitement I’ve felt in a room. Even the sugar rush costumed kids of the MCM Expos don’t get as excitable and fidgety as a room of Evangelion fans, most of whom had just sat through the first of these “remakes”.

They liked it a lot, giving it the most applause of the three films I saw.

I’m not so sure about it. It felt a lot like Peter Jackson’s Two Towers, in that there’s a lot to admire visually, but in terms of story, it’s all middle and it goes on too long. There are elements, like the new pilot character, that you are going to have to wait until the next film to get some feeling of whether they were worth including in this film. I liked the character, but at the same time, her presence in the film did little but add two fight scenes that were arguably two too many. Even if one of the fights was one of the better sequences in the film, I was getting burnt out on robot action by that point.

The other elephant in the room is the film’s nature as a reworking of material I’m already familiar with. That makes it hard to judge as a piece of work on it’s own in the same way that the film version of Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy gets judged against the radio, TV and novel versions. Or the Red Dwarf film would if it ever got made. Or Michael Mann’s Miami Vice film was against Michael Mann’s Miami Vice tv series (or to a lesser extent Heat & LA Takedown). Not to mention the multitude of BBC comedies that leapt from Radio to TV as I was growing up and would disappoint me with either changes in cast or straight recycling of gags. And once you move away from projects where the original creator was involved in some way, then the list gets ever bigger. It shouldn’t be a surprise that Evangelion gets reworked in this way, it’s more surprising that we don’t get more projects like this based on popular anime or manga. Which we probably are. I don’t have the time to plot remakes against time today.

For this particular film, the thing that bugged me was that there are elements in the film that go so far in the opposite direction from original TV series that you wonder if they are doing it because it’s right for the story, or because it’s a surprise for established fans, or because we’re going to get an ending that somehow unifies the whole Evangelion canon.

The way it ends suggests it will only take one more film to retell the remaining portion of the series and/or End of Evangelion, as they had originally indicated. So what is that fourth film with supposedly all new content going to be, and will it add extra meaning to the changes in the same way radio adaptations of later Hitchhiker’s books had to make sense of the conflicting book and radio continuities? The thing that really struck me about the changes was how positive some of the outcomes are to situations that went really badly in the TV series. Is that just a change in mood that the new character also seems to reflect, or is it something else? What about the visual elements cribbed from End of Evangelion rather than the TV series? Is that just because they are neat or are they trying to suggest something else?

Due to the nature of the original series, I’m left with this nagging feeling they are deliberately trying to be tricksy, and that they are going to end up disappointing me by trying too hard. In fact, even if they aren’t being tricksy, the fact that I suspect they are, might mean they’ll end up disappointing me anyway.

The counter-evidence to those continuity swerves is that, like the first film in this remake sequence, they have stripped a lot of the ambiguity of the plot away by putting it into focus more than the original did. You get much more of a sense of the political chicanery in the world and a clearer view of the arms race going on between NERV and SEELE. Where the TV series focused on the people, this series of films focuses more on the events. That may be what they are going for and everything else is just phantoms created in the mind of viewers already familiar with the material.

So, odd film and indifferent review. Which is about how I feel about the original series too. It’ll probably take someone with no Evangelion baggage at all to get a clear view on how well it works as a film, rather than as a pop culture ouroboros.

And now a short aside.

I don’t know if I’ve just become hyper aware of it, or simply that I’ve seen UFO on ITV4 in recent years, but in the first half, maybe two thirds, the Gerry Anderson influence seemed even stronger than the TV series. Particularly the fly past the SEELE moonbase, the shots of Tokyo-3, the whole visit to the aquarium sequence, the strobe effects in the Entry Plug and the personality differences in Rei. She really reminded me more of Marina from Stingray here than she ever did in the TV series.

5 thoughts on “Evangelion 2.0 You Can (Not) Advance”

  1. I’m going to avoid the remakes until they’re all finished and I can watch them in succession. Currently there’s too little story with too big a gap between films to appreciate the new narrative (at least that’s my excuse).

    Still hoping they’ll go ahead with a live-action Hollywood version, if only to see how they handle it. And because I want to know if Robin Williams will try and get involved, since he’s supposedly a massive Evangelion geek. Imagine the possibilities!

    1. That might be a good idea. At least until the third (though I think they were planning the 3rd and 4th in quicker succession). The pacing really makes it feel like 1-3 will stand alone quite nicely and the 4th will be a weird epilogue of some sort.

      1. Also: you talk about the more positive outcomes/happier tone – you think the story might be reflecting Anno’s healthier state of mind, just as the original was very much his animated Livejournal?

        1. Partly that, though I think Kazuya Tsurumaki and Masayuki sharing the director’s chair probably has a lot to do with it too. The changes remind me somewhat of Tsurumaki’s deconstruction of Gunbuster with Diebuster.

  2. It has been said that Evangelion:4.0 will be released alongside 3.0. I’ve interpreted that to mean that 3.0 and 4.0 will be movies in the same way that “episode 25′” and “episode 26′” make End of Evangelion.

    Though personally I’m kind of wishing that they’ll be two separate full-length movies, because even though the first two were flawed I found them extremely entertaining. That’s really all I dare hope for.

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