According to the results of the review, I can say that those who say that watching
"Evangelion" is necessary for everything and necessarily, are somewhat reckless. In order to adequately treat this spectacle, you need to at least know, and preferably love Japanese animation with all your heart. Because it's a very Japanese work. And to understand it 100%, I'm afraid you have to be Japanese. Or at least love Japanese culture very much. It creates a complete feeling that it was shot strictly for their own, even without the slightest intention to make it understandable to the European audience.
But these are not flaws – so, features. That is, a sophisticated viewer can get into the essence of this semantic construct with a cold mind, if he does not feel it with his soul. But that’s where he might be disappointed.
The plot is simple at first. Mankind is struggling with some incomprehensible “angels” or “apostles” (both terms are used in the original, the second is preferred, in the English and Russian versions – the first, in order to avoid political correctness). These are very strange huge monsters, like the classic Kaiju, which appear from space, from the depths of the ocean or the earth, and destroy cities. Only giant biorobots of the Evangelion system can cope with them, controlled by a select few – as is usual, of course, Japanese schoolchildren. The main character, Ikari Shinji, the classic OYash, is summoned from the Japanese wilderness for this honorable mission by commander Ikari Gendo himself, who is also his birth father. However, to combine these public duties, Gendo does not work, and Shinji’s mother died long ago, so the father of the future great pilot has a big tooth. Since even upon Shinji's arrival at the place of service, his father sees in him only a subordinate, although valuable.
Further, the viewer is waiting for several more heroes, a lot of Freudianism, conspiracy and esotericism. Which, in fact, would be nice. If not for the ending.
The last two episodes. It's something. It’s just a mockery of the viewer. Maybe a radical lover of art house and psychedelia and can put up with it. But even for me, it was too much. I respect Tarkovsky and Lynch is my favorite director. And the anime has seen a lot of brain-breaking.
The secret is simple: the creators have run out of money. And they, deprived of the opportunity to shoot the ending normally, decided to cut Freudian psychedelia. Fully.
(In fact, then the promised “grand finale” – the full-length “End of Evangelion” – was completed.) But about him - a separate conversation, now on the agenda - the original series.
What pleases and surprises me is that The End of Evangelion and subsequent remakes have been removed altogether. Because if it were not Japan, but, say, the United States, after such an end, the franchise would die. There and not such “chicken ripples” with golden eggs in the future cut. I also understand how the audience swallowed the same unfinished “Berserk” – there the fans were so, apparently, under the hypnosis of the source that they did not notice the fallout of the key scenes for the plot and the confused ending. But Eve's primary source is not!
Maybe when I look under a thousand titles, I'll be big enough to understand the meaning of this series. I’m sure he was in the project, but he stayed there.
Well, in detail, the main characters of this action, namely Shinji and Aska, did not cause any sympathy for me personally. However, who likes Shinji at all is a mystery to me, I have never met such spectators. But the cult of Aska among animeshniks, except for its stunning forms, cannot be explained. For she has two hypostases: a shoreless bitch and an amorphous depressive thing. Some people even see it as a sanctuary.
And luckily, Shinji and Aski are the most in the series. But for me personally, the more interesting Gendo and Rey are not disclosed at all.
Result: the series, of course, interesting, but raw and banal unmade. You can fool yourself and look for meaning in this piece, but the king, the imho, is naked. “The Gospel”, at least in isolation from the sequels, is a confused and indistinct attempt to implement some grandiose idea. Exactly which one remained a mystery. 7 out of 10
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