#...stripped of any kind of personality or development except maybe asuka but even that felt a little hollow

[minakoaiinos]

Evangelion 3.0 was supposed to be Shinji and Kaworu's Adolescence of Utena and it just wasn't. Like it had all of the elements to make something interesting. Kaworu has been going around for two movies now asking if it's his turn to show up and it was so fucking juicy at the end of the second movie that he said he was going to make Shinji happy this time like he knows they're in a time loop and instead of time looping in the cool interesting way that Adolescence of Utena did where the original concept repeated itself to the point it cycled back around and gave an alternative ending that said new interesting things about the themes we have been talking about all along, Eva 3.0 just relied on us caring about the original in some kind of vague yaoi way and tossed in some piano aesthetic and ultimately didn't say or do anything new when it was literally supposed to. It's just one more side effect of what I think is a fault of all the rebuild movies so far- the animation is so polished that it's lifeless and all of the important character work is completely lost in the shuffle until it feels lifeless too.

But considering how much Kaworu tipped the narrative in the original anime despite how little screen time he had and how much he's been hyped up here I really expected something new here and didn't get it. Part of what made the Kaworu narrative in the original anime so interesting was that for twenty something episodes we felt Shinji's loneliness and isolation and we trudged through so many episodes with it that Kaworu's presence felt like such a palpable relief in how he wanted to talk to Shinji and touch Shinji and it was also completely sinister in that he was just saying those things because that was just what Shinji wanted to hear. None of that was conveyed in 3.0 and that would be fine if it said something else interesting about their situation and it literally said nothing at all.