Evangelion: 2.22 You Can [Not] Advance – impressions

“Wow, what do we have here? Going to cook a meal for Shin too, Asuka? First Rei gets all romantic, and now you. ”

Less than a week from the English Premier League - get kickin'!

Damnit man, I wanna be Shinji: bitching all the time about how cruel his world is, and yet getting all the attention from 3 lovely ladies (on a sidenote, I’d HATE to taste Asuka’s cooking: it’d be all bitter and crap :P)! Anyway, it was a great relief that 2.22 far surpassed 1.11 in terms of plot. The second movie in the Rebuild series deviated significantly from the original story and introduced a new Eva pilot: the feisty and flirtatious Makinami Mari Illustrious.

Up close and personal with Miss Illustrious

I’m sure I’m not alone in saying that the animation just made me go *wow*. Studio Khara really knew where to put its money and effort in, because the fight scenes simply take your breath away. The sprinting scene where Units 00, 01 and 02 work together was especially nice.

Run Forrest, run!

However, behind the animation lies a pretty unbalanced story, and this is where the main fault of 2.22 lies. The movie’s calm moments essentially are reduced to your generic highschool love polygon yarn, with all the characters becoming no more than cliched highschoolers, from the gun nut, the brat who’s actually a decent guy inside, a brilliant tsundere and the emotionless mysterygirl.

I wish people would cook for me too... 😦

The addition of Mari, although much desired and warranted, is engulfed by whatever else is happening, and it’s not explored as much as I would have liked. It’s as if director Hideaki plonked her in just for the sake of providing service and gaining some sort of reaction from the core audience. She’s an interesting character, and deserves more screentime.

Falcon kick!

In addition, Asuka’s development and slight change in personality is pretty swift to be believable. Inevitably when you’re trying to compress an entire series and other movies into a set of four 2hr films, some things just have to be missed. It was also pretty unsubtle how Asuka became the butt of all this modern fanservice stuff. It just goes to show that the Rebuild series was MEANT for fans of the original Evangelion series, rather than newcomers.

A screwed up world has never looked this awesome

Heck if I was new to Eva, I’d be shitting bricks in my mind. Although 1.0 and 2.0 are compressed and adapted versions of the original series, there simply is no explanation. Only fans would undertstand the significance of Lilith, the Angels and the Key of Nebuchadnezzar.

Love Rei's (lack of) expression

So what do you guys think? Are you a Rei guy, Asuka guy, or now a Mari guy? 2.0 dazzles us with its amazing art, yet doesn’t quite nail it. The reason I haven’t exactly reviewed 2.22 is because it’s part of a tetralogy: you wouldn’t review just 2 episodes from a 13 episode series, would you? If 1.0 was a recap and scene-setting, then 2.0 was exploration and development. I guess we have a lot more to look forward to then in 3.0 and 4.0.

Father of the year award goes to....... GENDO IKARI