Neon Genesis Evangelion: The End of Evangelion (1997)

• Year: 1997
• Released: 01 Jun 2002
• Country: Japan
• Adwords: 2 wins
• IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0169858/
• Rotten Tomatoes: https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/neon_genesis_evangelion_the_end_of_evangelion
• Available in: 720p, 1080p,
• Language: Japanese
• MPA Rating: TV-MA
• Genre: Animation, Action, Drama
• Runtime: 87 min
• Writer: Hideaki Anno
• Director: Hideaki Anno, Kazuya Tsurumaki
• Cast: Megumi Ogata, Megumi Hayashibara, Yûko Miyamura
• Keywords: anime, post-apocalyptic future, insanity, philosophy, mecha,

	8.0/10
	89% – Critics
	85% – Audience

Neon Genesis Evangelion: The End of Evangelion Storyline

With the final Angel defeated, NERV HQ and the Eva pilots think their task is done. But it is soon revealed that all they’ve been fighting for is a lie: SEELE, the secret parent corporation of NERV, wanted to eliminate the Angels so it would be free to carry out the Human Instrumentality Project, ushering in a new level of human existence. However, SEELE discovers that NERV Director Gendou Ikari has betrayed them, as he plans to initiate his own altered version of the Project for his own plans. SEELE engineers a massive leave-no-survivors assault on Tokyo-3 by the conventional Japanese army, as well as deploying the 9 new mass-production model Eva units. With NERV being overwhelmed, the pilots of their 2 remaining Eva units mentally in no condition to fight, 9 horrifying new Eva’s bearing down on the base, and Gendou descending into the bowels of NERV HQ to attempt the bring about Third Impact with Rei, the future of humanity lies in 14 year old Shinji’s hands.

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Neon Genesis Evangelion: The End of Evangelion Movie Reviews

An animated sci-fi horror action movie that also comments on anime culture

Watching anime has always carried with it a social stigma: it is something for geeks, manchildren and perverts, not well-adjusted individuals. Of course there is the family-friendly, largely accepted anime of Hayao Miyazaki, and the teen-oriented action shows like Fullmetal Alchemist or Naruto, which are widely regarded as acceptable for the mainstream. But beyond that anime has a lot of unfortunate, ‘problematic’ tendencies. Anime idolizes cutesy and innocent girls in a sexual way, and in general treats women as sex objects, it has nonsensical, zany humor that seems infantile or incomprehensible to those encountering it for the first time, it is violent and graphic and often carries no ‘message’ for the audience, no lesson about inclusivity and solidarity. Anime fans also tend to get obsessed about anime. It seems to be addictive by its nature, drawing audiences in fantasy fulfillment and escapism, making them neglect ‘real life’ duties. Otaku culture is a big problem in Japan and is shunned by many anime creators, notably by Miyazaki himself.

Which brings me to Neon Genesis Evangelion. Evangelion is often hailed as a deconstruction of the mecha anime genre, in this context meaning that it took a popular anime genre and did something different with it, examined how it worked and what made it tick, took it apart and assembled the parts into something new. Evangelion gained a rabid following and merchandise relating to the show is still super popular 20 years after it was on air. This is largely because the anime introduced popular female characters that otakus love to moon over: Rei and Asuka. Both of these characters, one mysterious and submissive and the other so-called ‘tsundere’ meaning she’s willful and antagonistic but still in love with the protagonist, are endlessly copied in other anime. (Asuka’s character is partly based on the title character in Nadia, an earlier anime by Hideaki Anno.) Neon Genesis Evangelion the TV show ran out of funds before its conclusion, forcing its creator Anno to come up with two ending episodes that infamously feature hardly any animation and are ambiguous and introspective. A few years later this feature film was produced to make up for the ending: The End of Evangelion. I expect that fans of the show were waiting for it excitedly – they were finally going to know for sure what actually happened to their beloved characters. But as the psychological and surrealistic undertones of the TV show hinted, this was a story that was less about the ‘what actually happened’ and more about the expectations of the audience, subversion of genre and introspection, and the feature movie The End of Evangelion was no exception.

The End of Evangelion does tell the story – the literal story, not just what happened in protagonist Shinji’s head. But the story might not be to the liking of fans. I don’t know if Hideaki Anno purposefully wanted to insult his otaku audience and mock the entire anime culture, but it sure seems like it. The movie begins with Shinji masturbating to a comatose Asuka, a clear message on how disgusting it is to project sexual fantasies on a character that represents a vulnerable 14-year-old girl. The movie kills off every single one of the female characters that otakus love, and it does it in very frustrating ways. One survives a 12-against-1 battle only to find out that the enemies are actually undefeatable and the whole battle was a waste of time. She is eaten alive. One is blown to bits, another is shot offscreen, some are turned into orange jelly (though fans will be quick to point out that this represented only the death of their bodies, not their souls), and one grows into an alien giantess before decomposing and falling apart, her gargantuan pieces littering the landscape. And it also turns out that she was actually a clone of the protagonist’s mother. (This we already knew from the TV show so it’s not like we came into the movie expecting it to be another run-of-the-mill teen action adventure.) It is a brave endeavor, one that doesn’t really care about what people think, concerned only with the vision of its creator. It’s relentless, merciless and uncompromising. It makes no concessions – it doesn’t even feature the iconic theme song of the TV show. And above all it is beautiful. It is animated smoothly, the giant robots move with the weight they deserve, the colors and compositions are expertly crafted and there are many images that will stay with you in your daydreams and nightmares and that you will come across on the Internet message boards several times. The voice actors do a chillingly good job – the shrieks are so horrible that I don’t know if I ever heard anything as moving in any horror movie. I haven’t seen the English dub so I can’t comment on its quality.

The End of Evangelion is a robot action movie, and a good one, and it is a psychological movie, and a horror movie, and a science fiction movie, but it is also more than that. It manages to also be a commentary on anime itself, the state of the industry and the culture surrounding it. But it is also a look into the mind of the individual. At its heart it concentrates on why people do these things, why we become obsessed, alienated, violent, and the answers are found in the mechanics of the mind, and The End of Evangelion shines a light into the dark reaches of the human psyche.

Even worse than your usual anime film

Being an anime drama I largely knew what to expect from this: random plot, sci fi / fantasy elements that are overly complex in order to hide the weak plot, sexualised teens / kids. This has all that in spades but then takes the absurdity and crappiness up to the next level by having long dream / fantasy sequences that are, at best, random and gratuitous.

By the end these scenes consume the film so it is just one long, nonsensical sequence of random settings, images and scenes. In the beginning, while the plot was very weak there was at least some semblance of one and the action sequences were reasonably interesting. By the end it has gone from mediocre to ridiculously pretentious and bad.

“The time of the tribulation is now at hand.”

I hardly know where to start. Right up front, I only watched this because the movie has skirted it’s way in and out of the IMDb Top 250 last year and this. I’m not a fan of anime, but will watch when films rate well among IMDb viewers, and for the record, I gave high marks to “Grave of the Fireflies”, “Princess Mononoke”, and “Howl’s Moving Castle”. But this I just couldn’t comprehend. Granted, I didn’t watch any of the prior Neon Genesis franchise, nor am I inclined to do so. So I realize I start at a disadvantage. But for me, the imagery, dialog and characters were all lost in an incomprehensible story. Faced with a line like “Eva series and Geo-front have crossed E layer and are still climbing”, it sounds like a foreign language to me. There are even scenes in which the activity resembles that of a hyperkinetic lava lamp. Apparently this appeals to a certain segment of the viewing public, but if I had to come up with a single quote from the picture that personifies my attitude toward it, it would be “I don’t understand reality all that well”.