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Don't worry, no spoilers.

I used that picture as the title graphic not because Mari is hot—okay not only because Mari is hot—but because it in many ways encapsulates what Evangelion 2.22 is: a little bit of heaven, a little it of pain. As you may have noticed, today is May 26, the official release day of Evangelion 2.22 for home video. Through a process I don’t understand, fansubs had hit the internet as early as two days ago. So while the full review can wait until I get my imported copy, I’ll go over my first impressions of this Eva thing today.

The Mythology

The thing I like about Evangelion’s mythos is that it’s only sort of there. Neither the series nor the movies go to any great lengths to explain how every little thing works. You glean it through chatter, small details on the screen, and bits of animation. They only show you what you need to see. So though you get the sense that there are rules (however cryptic) at work, you don’t spend an inordinate amount of screen time learning them. If you wanted to find out more, you went to offscreen sources.

The Rebuild of Evangelion films handle the mythology the same way, showing only what you need to see for dramatic impact. Evangelion 2.22 is steeped in the mythos more deeply than its predecessor, making its changes and revisions more obvious but maybe not clearer. The reasoning behind these changes is not obvious, save for one practical production concern: most fans would have been able to guess what happened next if the writers had stuck to the source. Instead of trying to put a new spin on existing material, they went through the difficult process of creating mostly new material. As a result, Evangelion 2.22 manages to sustain a level of tension and drama that would have been lost had it simply been a retelling of the TV series. Starting around halfway through the film, during one of the climactic battles, it becomes apparent how the revisions have helped the film.

A Fan’s Perspective

As a fan, I enjoyed picking out the various differences between the film and the series. I found myself subconsciously filling in many details, which lead to a movie-watching experience that felt longer than it was. To me, Evangelion 2.22 is more, better Eva and it rides on the shoulders of the original work. As such it was easy to lose myself in the excitement and newness from scene to scene.

You can probably already guess that there is a lot of fanservice here, not just in the sense of partial nudity but in the amount of the universe that you see. Eva 1.0 mostly limited its scope to Shinji’s transformation into an Eva pilot. Eva 2.22 brings in more characters, more tech, more Angels, and more of the arcane wheelings and dealings characteristic of the end of the TV series. It breathes new life into old material.

A Non-fan’s Perspective

Still, it’s important to consider (strange as it may be) that there are people who don’t like Evangelion. What’s in it for them? That’s when the structure of the movie becomes a problem. Though the story deviates significantly from the original, the movie is still structured and paced like a connected string of television episodes. Story arcs don’t really span the entire film, so some scenes feel disjointed or rushed. Some effort was spent on developing the characters and building to the conclusion, but I feel it may not have been enough. There is a lot going on, and maybe the movie would have benefitted from cutting back the amount of battles to just one or two big ones.

In the worst case, you’ll have a viewer who hasn’t seen Evangelion at all going into this film. He’ll be able to divine the basic conflict, but the narrative would fall apart for him toward the end. The character relationships so critical to the series were mostly built in Eva 1.0 so the writers don’t repeat their efforts here. And even with a working knowledge of the Evangelion mythos, some scenes more or less lost me. I’m not sure a neophyte would have much of a chance.

To Be Continued

Basically, Eva 2.22 is somewhere between George Lucas’s enhanced editions of Star Wars and Ronald Moore’s reimagining of Battlestar Galactica. The fundamental chain of events is the same, and the tone is the same, but many of the details are different. Eva 1.0 built a good foundation for the Rebuild movies to stand on, and Eva 2.22 absolutely needs it. If you have that foundation, the movie is largely successful. But I would like to have a structure and story that acknowledges its cinematic nature. It needs exposition and more of a “big picture” to the script. Treating this like an extension to a TV show is wrong, and short changes the material.

Tags: Rebuild of Evangelion, Neon Genesis Evangelion, Shin Seiki Evangelion, Cinema File