The End of Evangelion (1997, Hideaki Anno & Kazuya Tsurumaki) (Patreon)

54/100

Ignoramus alert! Neon Genesis Evangelion (which I watched prior to this film, one episode per week over the course of six months) is my first experience with long-form anime...and while I'd intended to address the TV series just briefly before focusing on the film, that turns out to be not just ill-advised but downright impossible. The End of Evangelion—at least as it appears on Netflix; some quick googling suggests that any differences elsewhere are cosmetic—expressly serves as an alternate version of the show's final two episodes, even going so far as to mark where episode 25.1 (let's call it) ends and episode 26.1 begins. As it happens, 25.0 and 26.0—which is to say, the original conclusion—are the only episodes that I actively love, and the last thing I wanted was to see them explained, counteracted, or even supplemented. In short, what we have here is a solution to a problem that I submit never existed in the first place. 

So: the TV series. For the most part, it's not my thing. While striking images abound, they seem rooted in manga (another subject about which I know virtually nothing, please note), amounting to a series of dynamic poses rather than a kinetic flow. Presumably that's a budgetary issue, but knowing that they didn't have much money doesn't make the visual stasis any less distracting. One significant supporting character spends almost literally the entire series in a contemplative pose that places both hands before his jaw, obviating the need to animate his mouth when he speaks. Part of the charm for some, perhaps, but I couldn't even hack Speed Racer as a little kid. As for the apocalyptic narrative, its Angel Of The Week approach quickly grew wearisome for me, offering little more than the superficial novelty of discovering what bizarrely random form the latest model would assume and what strangely random powers it would possess. That leaves the characters, and I'm just not someone who's gonna empathize much with Shinji's daddy issues, or be amused by Asuka's petulance (which turns out to involve mommy issues), or identify with Rei's detachment. Maybe you have to be younger—I doubt I'd have much regard for, say, The Breakfast Club had I not initially seen it at age 17. But it also doesn't help to situate that adolescent angst within the context of a battle to save humanity itself from extinction. I was drawn mostly to Misato and Ritsuko, if only because they're both fully engaged with practical necessities. (Though that entails a whole lot of tedious dialogue at NERV HQ, with people forever shouting things like "Solenoid graph inverted! Ego boundary weakening!")

Consequently, I was thrilled when the show made an abrupt avant-garde lurch in the home stretch, abandoning any pretense of life on Earth ever returning to normal and enfolding everyone's neuroses into a Borg-like Human Instrumentality Project. The final episode, in particular, anticipates what Lynch would do with Mulholland Drive, albeit in reverse: It's as if he'd made an entire season about Diane and Camilla, concluding with an episode devoted to Betty and Rita (with no more explanation than we get in the actual film). Neon Genesis admittedly chickens out a little, ultimately withdrawing from Shinji's re-imagined world and deeming it one possibility of many (or something like that); I'd have preferred more conceptual fortitude. To my mind, though, that's otherwise a nearly perfect ending. I had no further questions and some difficulty imagining what this film could even possibly be about. Evangelion had already decisively End-ed.

Rabid fans back in the '90s did not agree, apparently. Thus this revised extended denouement, which is admittedly pretty bugfuck in its own right but nonetheless struck me as almost entirely superfluous. (And of course it's not really a movie, though I saw the version with just one set of credits—in very cool proto-Noé helix form—sandwiched between the two double-length episodes.) Major characters die heroically, but that seems almost meaningless given that we'd previously seen everyone merged into a single entity. Are we meant to mourn their absence from the collective? Meanwhile, the Christian symbolism, which had been omnipresent but relatively low-key, really goes into overdrive, with crosses fucking everywhere and the Lance of Longinus making a climactic reappearance. I did appreciate that Shinji's emotional issues finally transcend "Daddy didn't love me," reaching new levels of self-loathing; it's quite startling that the film opens with him jerking off to Asuka's comatose form (I guess Japanese filmmakers, too, can be more explicit when they move from TV to the big screen), and while I still prefer the original "fantasy" ending overall, Asuka's final utterance here is so unexpectedly harsh, and the choice to end on that note so audience-unfriendly, that I was genuinely taken aback. Hard to square that with my general sense of this as a cop-out intended to placate those who'd found the show's final episodes too obscure. In any case, can't say I'm eager to jump into Dragon Ball Z or Cowboy Bebop (though I know Rian Johnson's a huge fan of the latter). I may occasionally revisit Neon Genesis' opening credit sequence, though. Annoyed me at first, but by the seventh or eighth week I was not only eagerly looking forward to it but also singing the tune around the house, with invented English lyrics: "There's no neon in this motherfucking show / I don't know why they threw in that adjective..."