Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Evangelion: 3.0 + 1.0 Thrice Upon a Time’ on Amazon Prime, the Cataclysmic Grand Finale of an Anime Tetralogy

The epic finale of the Rebuild of Evangelion tetralogy, the convolutedly titled Evangelion: 3.0 + 1.0 Thrice Upon a Time, debuts internationally on Amazon Prime after an overwhelmingly successful theatrical run in Japan. The film was nearly a decade in the making, due to many production delays, among them director Hideaki Anno’s battle with depression, his being recruited to direct Shin Godzilla (which, if I may pause to editorialize, pretty much rules) and the COVID-19 pandemic. So at long last, this four-film reiteration of the Neon Genesis Evangelion TV series wraps with all the narrative and thematic climactic kerboom one expects from the wildly popular anime franchise, prompting many to assume the film’s psychological content undoubtedly reflects its creator’s personal struggles — channeled through scads of psychedelic giant robot action, of course.

EVANGELION: 3.0 + 1.0 THRICE UPON A TIME: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Before launching headlong into the craziness of the narrative present, Thrice Upon a Time recaps the three previous films with righteous fury. Then it drops us in Paris, which is red, meaning it’s been occupied by the evil forces of NERV. Wunder fleet members pound away furiously at laptops, attempting to restore the city to its former normal glory, but it won’t be easy, because enemy giant-robot Evangelion units don’t want that to happen. “Give us another 560 seconds!” someone screams with remarkable specificity in the middle of all the chaos, and the beautiful and heroic and slightly crazy Mari Illustrious Makinami (voice of Maaya Sakamoto), cyborg-piloting her own Eva, tries to do just that. Mega-scale battle and destruction ensues. One might be prompted to weep at the sight of the Eiffel Tower being chopped right the eff in half, except it’s actually a good thing, because Mari snatches the pointy top half of the Tower and plunges it into a thing that makes things climactically explode. Victory is theirs.

I’m not sure what the Battle of Paris means in the greater scheme of the story, but it was damn exciting, wasn’t it? We shift settings to a village outside Tokyo-3, where survivors of the multiple cataclysms that happened in the first three movies have made humble, satisfying lives for themselves. Toji Suzuhara (Tomokazu Seki), Hikari Horaki (Junko Iwao) and Kensuke Aida (Tetsuya Iwanaga) are adults now, the first two married with a child. Hero Eva pilots Shinji Ikari (Megumi Ogata), Rei Ayanami (Megumi Hayashibara) and Asuka Langley Shikinami (Yuko Miyamura) come across the village, and are kind of almost assimilated into the population. Rei learns what a cat is and what “cute” means and sees a human baby for the first time, and sort of becomes a farmer, while Asuka lays around in barely any clothing and is endlessly irritated by Shinji because he’s sunk into a deep depressive funk. He won’t eat or speak, and barely moves, and Asuka gets fed up and violently force-feeds him.

But the three pilots’ fates do not lie in pastoral Japan held in a fragile and tentative protective state from the uber-destroyed Earth-hell outside their technologically rendered bubble. Oh no. This is merely the calm before the storm before another storm, half of the film’s runtime eaten up by some relatively quiet human drama rife with character development (and a surprise development or two) before the plot hits Ludicrous Speed. Inevitably, the forces of good assemble their spaceships and battling seizure robots for an ultimate strategic maneuver, which is trumped by a more ultimate strategic maneuver, followed by a few more even more ultimate strategic maneuvers that don’t just border on neo-religious nigh-apocalyptic reverie, but are absolutely about life, the universe and all that exists in the physical and psychological realms. Did we expect anything less?

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: The way the film travels through vast cosmic planes to find a destination within the mind tells me that Anno may have been inspired by 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Performance Worth Watching: This prize goes to Anno, for visualizing some of the most insane imagery this side of David Lynch.

Memorable Dialogue: The script word-for-word cribs the slogan from my family crest when the big bad villain says, “I’ll slay the gods, blind them with humanity, and through the sacrifice of Angels, enable the deification and the instrumentality of humankind.”

Sex and Skin: Primarily the anime stereotype of heavily idealized females in various states of undress.

Our Take: At one point during the big battle, a character behind a bank of buttons and screens declares, “That ship could also slay gods. She won’t be a pushover,” and I’ve decided that’s as apt a review of Thrice Upon a Time as anything I could come up with. In other words, it takes some significant work to get to this point in Rebuild of Evangelion, plowing through three-and-a-half films of OTT action, scads of sci-fi-tech jibber-jabber and declarative dialogue, and ultra-mega-uber-layers of hyperbole to get to this, the cataclysmic endpoint of this wild and expansive story. And to quote another character behind a bank of buttons and screens during the big battle, “This is NUUUUUUUUUUUTS!”

And it’s not just a meaningless display of violence — newcomers may be surprised at the depth of storytelling Anno cultivates, how it earnestly addresses Shinji’s mental illness, tackling the psychological fallout stemming from witnessing death and destruction during a high-stakes war that’s inextricably tied to one’s family traumas. Anno opens the film with crowd-pleasing action, delves into the psychological stuff, shifts to a skirmish set beyond all planes of reality and finds yet another psychological plane beyond those planes, and it’s all bedecked by wondrously detailed and tirelessly creative psychedelic imagery. Theoretically, one could ignore the almost impenetrably dense plotting and objectively watch the film for its visuals alone, from the elegant, Ghibli-esque simplicity of its Tokyo-3 scenes to the second half’s parade of hallucinatory sequences, each one crazier than the previous.

But one must also be indoctrinated to the cliches of anime, which the film embraces wholesale: Characters that are best described as being wildly, unapologetically emo. Lunatic soundtrack cues, which range from opera to corny old Star Blazers-derived themes to hyper-techno to whammy-bar shred guitars to Christmas carols. Feelgood easy listening pop songs playing atop images of robots viciously impaling each other on gigantic mega-swords. Villains declaring the hero’s powers to be feeble and useless in the face of such evil might and whatnot. All this adds up to a general Too-Muchness on all fronts — I mean, the story begins with a paltry collection of apocalypses and builds from there. This is the type of stuff that keeps anime firmly within the confines of its cult following in America, even as it crosses over to the mainstream in Japan. Which is a long way of saying that you’re either in this for the long haul, or you’re baffled, and rarely shall the twain meet.

Our Call: Once again: This is nuuuuuuuuuts. STREAM IT.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com or follow him on Twitter: @johnserba.

Stream Evangelion: 3.0 + 1.0 Thrice Upon a Time on Amazon Prime