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Shelf Life - Evangelion 3.33: You Can (Not) Advance

No, not offensive, but it sounded like Gabriella was projecting her own agenda into the movie, actively looking for something that most viewers might not have seen there, which I don't think is true. My problem was probably with the "LGBT stuff in response to the "yaoi thing" which seemed to degrade the Shinji-Kaworu relationship to something less genuine than other relationships in Evangelion.

Megumi Ogata makes Shinji sound like a vulnerable, meek youth, with varied layers of sensitivity and self-loathing. Spencer makes him sound like a whiny, obnoxious little stereotype coward, a flat, one-dimensional straw man for disaffected "wussy boys". He may as well sound like Milhouse van Houten.

Put simply, what we had in this movie was not a plot--it was a sequential series of events where characters who really should have known better took turns acting like idiots for the sake of advancing from Point A to Point Z. From spoiler[Misato and Ritsuko feeding Shinji incomprehensible orders and misleading, minimalist explanations (apparently for the sake of leaving the viewer in the dark) where a full explanation would have been more productive], to spoiler[Shinji suddenly and inexplicably deciding during the climax to ignore the warnings of Kaworu--whom he'd spent the entire second half of the film learning to rely on and trust--that something was wrong], nothing in this movie makes any sense.

It does make sense, though. For the first bit: spoiler[Shinji destroyed half the planet to save some girl, who was one of many clones, and it seems she wasn't saved in the end anyway.] It's not terribly surprising that most of his former allies no longer trust him, especially Misato, who has some personal trauma associated with the previous Impact. He didn't intend to cause so much damage, but they have no way of knowing that, so they don't want to risk giving him too much information.

That makes sense to a degree, but the movie didn't even really bring that up. If there had been even one scene with Misato, Asuka, etc. covering why they were so hostile it would have worked so much better.

Videogamep wrote:

That makes sense to a degree, but the movie didn't even really bring that up. If there had been even one scene with Misato, Asuka, etc. covering why they were so hostile it would have worked so much better.

But..they didn't really have to spell it all out. spoiler[Shinji destroyed half the planet...that's a pretty good reason to be hostile to someone. Also, there's a theory that they were vague with him because they weren't even sure if he actually was Shinji - if you look at his foot, it says something like 'S. Ikari????' on it.]
Evangelion has never be the kind of show to just spoon feed its audience, which is one of the reasons why I love it so much. After 26 episodes and three movies, we should be able to understand these characters enough that we don't need to have everything explained to us.

A conversation with Misato and the others that didn't involve pointless mech transformations or being angrily cryptic would have fixed the entire issue. Even her being straight up angry with Shinji would have worked instead of just being cold and cryptic the entire time.

Because if NGE has a law it is that nobody can ever tells Shinji anything that makes sense or that he can trust or both.

For that matter if that's the way they felt about it why revive Shinji at all? Was that ever explained? If they just wanted to keep him out of Gendo's hands it would have made a lot more sense to keep him on ice even if they have to move it somewhere. They certainly didn't want him for any other reason I can see.

I would have been more surprised if they had been explicit about it. I just mean they should have given us something. A conversation with Misato and the others that didn't involve pointless mech transformations or being angrily cryptic would have fixed the entire issue. Even her being straight up angry with Shinji would have worked instead of just being cold and cryptic the entire time.

No one who knows Shinji has any right to look down on him for starting spoiler[3rd impact] and all the destruction resulting from that action, especially Misato.

In Rebuild, the Third Impact happens after the incident with Unit-03. But instead of the whole thing playing out End of Evangelion-style, here they manage to halt the process relatively early. The planet ends up transformed into a red wasteland, but nobody has turned into yellow goo yet. Rei seems to have died, and for what he did, Shinji is placed in stasis and locked away.