Review: Evangelion: 3.0+1.0 Thrice Upon a Time Rages Against the Dying of the Light

Anno Hideaki finally brings the Rebuild of Evangelion film series to a close with the long-delayed fourth entry in the saga, Evangelion: 3.0+1.0 Thrice Upon a Time. Though it’s a direct sequel to Evangelion: 3.0 You Can (Not) Redo, the film pushes further into uncharted narrative and thematic terrain than its predecessor as it “rebuilds” the core elements of Anno’s landmark anime television series Neon Genesis Evangelion.

After teen mech pilot Shinji Ikari (Ogata Megumi) was forced to fight against invading aliens by his father, Gendo (Tachiki Fumihiko), the experience of war and mass death left him in a catatonic state, and the revelation that the alien takeover is being encouraged by Gendo as the next stage of human evolution only further broke the kid. Then and now, the only solace he finds is among his closest allies, who are as much people as they are manifestations of his tortured psyche. The demure and pacifying Rei Ayanami (Hayashibara Megumi) was even revealed, in an Oedipal twist, to be a clone of the boy’s mother in the prior film.

Anno and Tsurumaki Kazuya’s 1997 film The End of Evangelion, which serves as a parallel ending to Neon Genesis Evangelion, is a surreal nightmare vision of Anno reckoning with his own depression by manifesting the apocalypse as an externalized act of one addled young man’s willful obliteration. For all that film’s scope and grandeur, it was fundamentally insular, its Grand Guignol horrors resolving in a plaintive coda. By contrast, this film rages against the dying of the light. Shinji is just as shattered as ever, but now he finds a wellspring of courage to confront his father, and the psychedelic extended climax that takes place in a battleground of the mind is less an evocation of surrender than of resistance and self-actualization.

This turn is set up not only with outlandish action scenes of giant robots and flying battleships at war with each other but, shockingly, in a host of quiet, contemplative scenes that dominate the first half of Thrice Upon a Time. The events of Evangelion: 3.0 You Can (Not) Redo left much of the world in a kind of suspended animation, with buildings unmoored from gravity and floating in place over cities and the countryside, and this stasis gives Shinji, Rei, and their comrade Asuka Shikinami (Miyamura Yūko) the space to work through their issues.

Hiding out in a patch of preserved farmland with some surviving friends, the trio get to spend time with others in a capacity other than combat. Rei, still coming to terms with the knowledge that she’s a fake, tries to process emotion, as when she watches a baby sleep in an empty room and wonders, “Is this how it feels to be lonely?” Elsewhere, another soldier admits that they wish they could read all the books in the world for the wisdom they contain, a remark said not so much with Faustian zeal as a desire to feel connected to all those dead writers.

Thrice Upon a Time can at times be narratively baffling, with events playing out as much within Shinji’s subconscious as reality, and as with the other films in the Rebuild of Evangelion series, for every visual upgrade afforded by newer animation technology there’s at least one instance of garish CGI that looks far inferior to the old TV cel work.

Yet the film finds in its climax a synthesis between the nihilistic tone of The End of Evangelion and the more hopeful terms of the anime’s original intended finale, in which Shinji worked his way through his trauma and emerged on the other side able to embrace and be embraced by his peers. The End of Evangelion saw in the liquefaction of mankind into jelly a perfect expression of losing one’s sense of self. Here, a similar prospect of humanity’s post-physical fusion is the logical, if extreme, endpoint of the film’s fervent wish for human connection and the idea that our sense of self is informed by those who also share that wish.