Evangelion has ended twice before.
The first ending, a two-part finale to the 26-episode run of the original 1995 anime, was the result of a troubled production. Funding slashed and severely depressed, creator-director-writer Hideaki Anno was forced to abandon the planned conclusion for a treatise on the human condition paired with minimalist animation: reused storyboards, half-complete stills, and at times completely abstract imagery. Plotlines were abandoned; the series had emotional resolution but lacked narrative satisfaction. Neither Anno nor the fans were happy with this outcome.
In 1997, the aptly titled End of Evangelion was released. Billed as the “true ending” to the series, expectations were colossal — fans wanted the action-packed mecha-battle royale they felt they were owed. What they got was one of the most sustained assaults on an audience in mainstream entertainment. Everybody dies horribly. Humanity is reduced to a sea of orange goo. Shinji (Ogata Megumi), the series’ put-upon protagonist, is forced to self-actualize in the most vicious manner imaginable. He can choose to let all humans exist together as a single formless consciousness, devoid of all feelings, or he can embrace individuality and the suffering, loneliness, and pain of being. In a grim and nihilistic move, he chooses the latter.
Now, 26 years since Neon Genesis Evangelion entered pop culture and 14 since its revitalization as a tetralogy of “rebuild” films, we have a third ending, different again. This one feels final.
Evangelion 3.0 + 1.0: Thrice Upon a Time opens big. In what is arguably the franchise’s biggest set piece to date, we are reminded of the basic premise — 14-year old children pilot giant biomechanical robots called EVAs to protect humanity from strange beings called Angels — and brought up to speed on the key players and factions. NERV, the organisation once tasked with creating EVAs, is now a shadowy cabal led by Shinji’s father Gendo Ikari (Tachiki Fumihiko). They are hell-bent on destroying the world. They are opposed by WILLE, a band of Star Wars rebellion-style freedom fighters (minus the hope) led by Misato Katsuragi (Mitsuishi Kotono), who aim to restore the world. NERV and WILLE skirmish above the ruins of Paris; it is a fast-paced opening with clear, followable action. It marks a return to form for Anno, whose set-pieces became somewhat muddled in the ambitious (if not entirely successful) You Can (Not) Redo. This set piece is dwarfed by the ones that follow.
From here, the film pivots to the series’ three main leads: pilots Shinji, Asuka Langley (Miyamura Yūko), and Rei Ayanami (Hayashibara Megumi). Picking up where the previous film left off, the trio trek across the desolate remains of Tokyo-3. Stranded without any EVAs to pilot, they are in terrible shape. Asuka is angry: at Shinji, who won’t take responsibility for nearly destroying the world again and won’t fight for anything after the death of Kaworu (Ishida Akira); at Rei, who doesn’t know who she is or what her purpose is; and at her own helplessness. The world is hell, and she feels like there’s nothing she can do to save it.
Rather than force the Freudian trio to work through their issues in combat, which has been Evangelion’s modus operandi up until this point, Anno puts them in the situation they are least equipped to handle: everyday life. They are picked up by a group of familiar faces — I won’t spoil who, but let’s just say they’re a welcome reprieve after the isolation and misery of You Can (Not) Redo — who cart them off to an agrarian sanctuary, a village of survivors working together to rebuild after Shinji nearly destroyed the world by setting off a cataclysmic event called an “impact” (twice).
Misato and WILLE come to fetch them eventually, but not before they spend an hour of the film’s two-and-half-hour runtime getting a taste for the quiet life. Simple pleasures — farming, eating, reading, having someone to wish them “good morning” and “good night” — are the kind of normalcy the pilots have been denied until this point. For the first time, they seem to find a small amount of peace; Shinji and Rei especially exhibit happiness they lacked before.
This stretch is arguably the film’s strongest. The slow pace makes room for the kind of worldbuilding the rebuilds have been promising for three films now, which, paired with the rustic charm of the village, gives this section a Miyazaki quality, like Laputa: Castle in the Sky’s mature cousin. The soft touch of this section makes it all the more heartbreaking when the pilots must eventually abandon it to fight NERV. As the film races toward its climax, you get the feeling the pilots are not fighting to save the world as much as they are fighting for a chance to just live a normal life, free of the adult machinations that have always shaped their destiny.
And what machinations they are. On paper, the plot is perfectly straightforward. Gendo wants to start the Fourth Impact; WILLE wants to stop him. But in true Evangelion fashion, this plot is built out with dense lore, an onslaught of proper nouns lifted from Judaeo-Christian religions. No one would accuse Anno of being a master of set-up and payoff; plot devices — mythic lances, divine airships — are introduced ad hoc and discarded just as quickly. There’s little in the way of explanation. The sheer spectacle of the science-fiction operatics, made all the bigger by Shiro Sagisu’s score, helps smooth over plot holes and logic gaps. Nevertheless, viewers who get too attached to understanding how all this is happening may throw their hands up in defeat.
But “how” has never really been the point of Evangelion. The franchise is built upon a series of “why”s. Why persevere when life gets tough? Why keep reaching out to people when all they do is hurt you? Why fight when the odds look impossible? Anno (along with his team of co-directors Nakayama Katsuichi, Tsurumaki Kazuya, and Maeda Mahiro) take on the task of finally providing a satisfying answer.
Shinji has always been something of a cipher for Anno — his self-loathing, misery, anxiety, and depression. Since 1995, Anno has been trapped with Shinji, and we have been trapped with them, along for the ride through redux after redux, a second go at an ending, a second go at telling the story entirely. Thrice Upon a Time draws from every iteration of Evangelion and folds them together (validating a few theories about what the rebuild series is to the overall continuity along the way), creating a new ending out of the pieces of the first two. The abstraction of the first and the grim violence of the second are remixed into a film that makes more room for both. There’s spades of philosophising, the kind that defines the franchise, but it never comes at the expense of the action, which matches the escalating scale with a sense of desperation. At times there is an overreliance on CGI, but for the most part, battles feel tangible in a way that blockbusters with gargantuan stakes usually don’t.
We delve into the psyches of the characters, finally getting to the bedrock of their wells of trauma. What’s most shocking is not that we finally get some answers to the series’ most pressing questions, but that the answers are uniformly hopeful. After a quarter-century of nihilism, Anno flips the script.
What’s most impressive is that Thrice Upon a Time earns its emotional heel-turn ending without compromising the series and films that came before it. This film synthesizes the franchise’s every move, even the ones that felt like missteps at the time, into a unified vision. Every piece fits together, as satisfying as it is definitive. For Anno, for Shinji and his friends, for every fan who has felt their experiences mirrored in the iterations of Evangelion, this is filmmaking as catharsis. Of course, catharsis doesn’t mean things become easy. Whether it is getting in a giant robot to save the world or simply finding the will to keep on keeping on, there will always be new challenges. Life is hard; life is wonderful. And, at long last, Shinji appears to be at peace with living.
