I must say, I’m impressed. From all the stories I heard about this movie, I expected it to be filled with mainstream action, emo and screaming. After the public rage against the two rather weird final episodes of the series, I thought that Anno Hideaki would play it safe to please the fans, and go with something mainstream. Instead, he went along with the public for episode 25, but then happily decided to make the twenty-sixth episode into what the original end of the series would have been if it was given enough budget: strange, absurd, confusing and a work of art.
Let me get one thing straight, though: the End of Evangelion is very flawed in terms of storytelling. Almost nothing is explained, and some major scenes hugely lack in coherency. Don’t expect anything in the second half of this movie to make sense. The bad guys never get any explanation about their actions, and neither do we know where these other eleven angels came from. Episode 25 also starts out really disappointing, when it basically shows all of the new scenes of Death and Rebirth once more, making me wonder about the point of that movie in the first place. It then continues with the usual action-plot that just couldn’t grab my interest, with your occasional disturbing graphical scene and a bit of screaming here and there.
This movie starts to get really interesting with the arrival of episode 26 though, when the characters start talking to each other. It’s here where everything of the series comes together and this series slowly turns into a piece of art. A lot of things will end up not making any sense, but it turns into quite an interesting watch, that in my opinion beats the original finale of the series. The storytelling for this series may be messed up, but the dialogue between the characters is excellent.
Overall, if you hated movies like Tamala 2011 or Cat Soup, then you should stay away from this series, but otherwise the End of Evangelion served its purpose to give a satisfying ending to the original series. I feel that if this would have been a major action-packed ending, it would have failed, since Neon Genesis Evangelion was supposed to be strange and complex to begin with. Episode 26 fits Neon Genesis Evangelion perfectly, although it will be annoying to get through episode 25 to get there.
Eleven angels? What are you talking about there? You mean EVA series 5-13? If so, SEELE with Kaworu dummy system much?
Ack, that was my mistake. I indeed meant the EVA-series. It felt like these really came from nowhere.
In a nutshell:
SEELE attacked NERV to fulfil its ultimate objective of eliminating human hatred, by dissolving humanity into the liquid LCL, the constituent of all life. The (rather silly / arty) Shinji x Rei scene was a vision of this sort of future, which Shinji rejected. The angels were hitherto repelled as they would outright defeat humanity. Hence the anti-NERV offensive commenced after the defeat of the last angel (Kaworu in ep24). Incidentally, the angels come from an unspecified region of outer space.
The EVAs piloted by the main characters were test models (except Asuka’s), and the 12 which attacked her at the end were produced in secret.
All a bit weird, but overall I enjoyed it. Of course not everything can be explained (I still don’t get the giant interstellar Kaworu), but Anno makes a psychological point which stands even though his work is highly metaphorical and obfuscated.
Oh and Happy Christmas!
The SEELE guys wanted to trigger forced evolution of the humanity as response to the Second Impact : all they want is to “destroy” humanity, out of pure bonté. In their opinion, the only way to avoid problems generated by human interaction is to dissolve humanity : it’s like tossing your cumputer to avoid viruses and infections. They followed what they read in the Dead Sea Scrolls to do so.
To trigger Instrumentality, they had to reunite Adam and Lilith and to create the Tree of Life (hence the Mass Production EVAs (produced by SEELE) who are crucified by duplicates of the Lance of Longinus in the form of a “cross-tree”). Adam was given to Rei by Gendo, and Lilith was in Terminal Dogma. They eventually merged and everything to trigger the Instrumentality is in place. There is only one thing left : Shinji’s decision. Why ? Because. I think it was because Rei trusted him enough and thought he was able to do the right choice, as he is one who suffered quite some of the typically human pains and is well placed to decide if interaction between humans must be nullified.
Ultimately, and maybe too late, Shinji rejects instrumentality : after he questionned himself, Shinji realised that Instrumentality isn’t the answer to human pain and that interaction sure created problems, but has the possibility to solve them too : it IS possible de fin answers to suffering by talking and interacting.
By rejecting Instrumentality, Lilith’s body dissolves, Lilith’s Egg explodes and Shinji regains his body. As every single human in Earth was turned into LCL (the primary liquid from which every life originated), it is safe to assume that the other human beings did not regain their physical bodies, but it is acceptable to argue that all they need is the courage to live again and to interact with other people with the risk of being hurt. Why has Asuka regained her body first ? Remember what she discovered just before her death ? She discovered that her mother’s soul was actually in Eva 02 and that all this time, she’s been protecting her and she’s always loved her. This erased all the problems she has in mind, and gave a sense to her life. This is why she regained her body so fast. All the other humans can potentially regain their bodies with the courage to live. Asuka didn’t know that yet and felt bad thinking the she would live alone with a loser such as Shinji.
But wait, why the FUCK are there even Angels and Humans and Lilith and Adam and Terminal Dogma and all this crap ?
Answers in Neon Genesis Evangelion II, RPG in PS2.
Adam and Lilith were created by an ancient extraterrestrial species known only as First Ancestral Beings. They were sent to Earth in the White Egg and Black Egg. An examplary of the Lance of Longinus was sent along inside of both eggs to control them. Their purpose was to seed life across the universe.
Adam possessed the Fruit of Life, therefore Angels (who are the living beings born from Adam) possess immense power and are, and Lilith possessed the Fruit of Knowledge, therefore Human Beings (born from Lilith) possess immense intelligence and psychological potentiel.
Angels and Humans were never supposed to coexist because they are living beings and they need all the ressources from a planet for themselves. But unfortunately, it happened on Earth : first, a White Egg crashed in the Antartic, and a few million years before our era, a Black Egg crashed too – the First Impact. It rebound, but not only it was trapped in the Earth’s orbit (we call it today the “Moon”), a little bit of it fell and got buried into Earth – and eventually brought Lilith to our lovely planet.
The Human Beings woke up, but the Angels remained dormant for millions of years. Until September 13th, 2000, when Human Beings woke Adam up – and the Angels along the way. Then commenced the war between Humans and Angels to gain control of the planet Earth to survive.
I hoped all of Neon Genesis Evangelion haters finally get an answer from this. ranted, you need to play the game to get all the thing, but it’s just as you need to play the .hack// games to get all the thing, everything shouldn’t obligatorily be explained in a single media. Evangelion then isn’t this kinda series which throws everything at your face without explaining it “because it’s cool and you will feel stupid”.
I really like the Evangelion series. Coming from a film background, I was especially intrigued by the cinematic staging of many scenes. It made me want to see a live action version (up to a point) However, I can’t really say that the end was worth it. After watching “End of Evangelion”, I suddenly found myself wishing that the series had ended with the original eps 25 & 26. Still a series, or a book, should in some respects be a complete package, and one shouldn’t have to go to a different medium in order to explain something significant to understand the original. That is a sign of bad storytelling plain and simple. The unobjective may fall for it, but I call it a money grab. (Lastest offender G. Lucas, by including a character that made no damn sense until one watched a animated series. You all know who I’m talking about.
It’s obvious there was too much sub text in end of eva for you to wrap your pretentious little head around. Everything is explained, not so much with dialogue, but through intricate suggestion. If you knew anything about Eva or Hideaki Anno’s style of story-telling you’d know emotion is key to delivering a message.
I loved this movie so much and understood it better after watching it for the second time.
The movie also really suffers from a lot of key scenes having been cut out, which means that some key parts of the continuity are missing, such as the explanation for how the 01 broke out of lilith, how the eva series wound up back on earth and so on. Basically if it seems the continuity jumps, its because that part of the movie was cut, rather than due to confusing writing to begin with.
Overall, while good on its own, this movie truly shines if you see it as a complement to episode 25 and 26 in the series, where the series deals with the philosophy, while the movie tells the story of what happens in the “real world”. It should also be noted that some of the scenes cross over; During Asuka’s “part” of the final two episodes, you see her sitting inside unit 02 during the events of end of evangelion. Rather than argue about what ending is best, and seing them as mutually exclusive, it behooves the viewer to rather see them as a single whole that is greater than the sum of its parts.
Just as it seems the rebuild are also using this approach as there are hints in there that that storyline of RoE might actually take part after End of Evangelion, or during one of the alternative realities we get presented in episode 26.
As for the ending, i think it was mentioned somewhere in the final dialogue that they will be able to return to their own selves if they wish to and are able to.