New regurgitated Evangelion
In my eyes, Neon Genesis Evangelion is the greatest Japanese anime ever created, and with the exception of some of Hayao Miyazaki’s works, few others ever came close to its sublimity. Its façade is misleading, resembling a modern retelling of Ultraman, with kids piloting giant beings to battle alien monstrosities. Beneath it is a very adult, complex tale of politics, conspiracies, religion and technology, with some intense, psychological dissections of its characters thrown in for good measure. Other than a few childish comedic moments, every aspect of Evangelion was treated with a high level of seriousness and realism. (Well, as real as a series about three-hundred-foot monsters can get.) The high-tech equipments look like they were designed with tangible engineering applications in mind, and the religious symbols and concepts are drawn from unorthodox Christian mythology. Its action sequences are majestic and unusually brutal, with the heroes desperately fighting for self-preservation rather than to show off some fancy skills. The series finished its run with a pair of mind-boggling episodes that were clearly Stanley Kubrick-inspired. All of this happened between 1995 and 1996.
Evangelion: 1.0 You Are (Not) Alone (first of a four-parter) is not really the first Evangelion movie adaptation. In 1997, they released two “movies” that were actually quick recaps of the series with added new materials, not unlike the Star Wars Special Editions. This was followed by End of Evangelion, which sort of disregarded the infamous last two episodes and provided a more literal finale to the series, but one that still could not resist screwing with the viewers’ minds. Eva 1.0 is more like a repackaging of the series, jettisoning a lot of the fat and redundant chapters between episodes one to six. It begins exactly like Episode One, with fourteen-year-old reluctant hero Shinji Ikari arriving at Tokyo-3 at the behest of his estranged father, Gendo. Shinji’s father runs the special government division set up to deal with the behemoths that are attacking the city. He has designed a weapon to counter the enemies they called the “Angels,” and it’s a giant humanoid sealed in a metal suit, but which only Shinji can pilot. Apparently, a religious prophecy heralded the arrival of the Angels, who will bring forth the end of days unless Shinji and several other pilots stop them.
The new sequences in Eva 1.0 are a lot more than what were in the ‘97 recaps, and they are mostly graphical enhancements. Machines and gears now ram together more frequently in an orgy of movement and sound. A few others are new dialogue sequences that explain the mythology a little further, but I’m sorry to say they still tend to pose more questions than answer them. Some of the Angels have been given a complete CG overhaul, while the level of destruction has been raised to jaw-dropping levels. Apart from that, the art has been redrawn with extra definition, in order to hold up on a larger cinema screen. But a lot of scenes were redone almost shot-for-shot that I mistook them for the original animation cells, until I checked my DVD copy and realised how low-def the original series was in comparison to the movie.
If the makers of Eva 1.0 are trying to garner new fans from this endeavour, I don’t think trimming down the episodic content of the series to movie length will do the trick. Because it’s not a proper adaptation of the series, Eva 1.0 just waddles through six episodes’ worth of events and caps it off with Episode Six’s unexceptional, cliffhanger-free finale. As for the veterans, it is a little disappointing and tiring to see yet another regurgitation of the series. You can only watch so much of the same sh** over and over again before you start dozing off, and that was what nearly happened during Eva 1.0. It doesn’t matter how great the original material once was, or how much you try to garnish it with details and shiny metallic objects. - BMF
Directed by Masayuki (Neon Genesis Evangelion: Death & Rebirth) and Kazuya Tsurumaki (End of Evangelion, Neon Genesis Evangelion: Death & Rebirth), and screenplay by Hideaki Anno (The Invention of Destruction in the Imaginary Machines, Ritual). Voices by Megumi Ogata, Megumi Hayashibara, Kotono Mitsuishi, Yuriko Yamaguchi and Fumihiko Tachiki. Based on the anime and manga created by Hideaki Anno and Yoshiyuki Sadamoto (if this isn't true, please correct me). |
