Warning: This review may contain what some people may classify as mild spoilers. They won't ruin the film, but if you want to watch it knowing nothing, please read only the final paragraph.
[HEADING=1]Evangelion 2.22: You Can (Not) Advance[/HEADING]
And so I reach the end of all things Evangelion at this time. I could do the manga if I had more money for all the books, so I won't, and I could do the Death and Rebirth film, but I struggled with Evangelion 1.11 since that was the same thing as the start of Evangelion, so a movie dedicated to retelling the entire story a little bit seems kind of pointless to talk about. But now, we have Evangelion 2.22, the second film in our brand new Rebuild continuity. This film is a film that is dividing some of the fans (like Evangelion fans need any more to be divided about, like dub quality, the significance of some elements and even Shinji himself), and it's not hard to see why, because this is something that is shaking every thing we knew about the series.
Damn, he knows he is the sharpest looking mecha right now.
With the changes to the story also come changes to the characters themselves, hinted at slightly in the last film but now totally prominent and in your face. Shinji and Rei appear to be the characters with the most change in them. I won't say how, but I found that the changes fitted with characters perfectly, even though they were incredibly drastic. Rei's change of voice actor is something that can now be thanked for in the English dub, as the new voice actor fits the role much better with the changes, compared to the monotone that the original one brought. Even Spike Spencer's less whiny tone in voicing Shinji helps his character in this continuity.
Oh yes, the voice acting in this is brilliant, but also exists in the rare bizarre dimension where I feel that the English voice acting is better than the Japanese voice acting. This is mainly for the sole reason that there are parts where English is spoken in both versions. While the Japanese voice cast did hire some English voice actors, and for Mari they hired someone who could speak both well, there is a god damn near incomprehensible moment from one character from the original series, who can speak English about as eloquently as a hippo can tap dance. When he says "Good luck" it sounds more like "Ker bleh". The performances are great, all in all, though remember in the last review I noted that Fuyutsuki and Gedno sounded similar in the English version? This flags up again, and since there are a few times where you can't see whose lips are moving, you can only hazard best guesses on which one of them is speaking. Not a major problem though, after all, at least you can understand what they're saying.
Something tells me this stairway is going to get very crowded.
Not from me, but certainly from others. The divide in fan base is caused by two reasons, with the fights being one of them. Some argue that the fights don't suit Evangelion, that they are actually more suited to the aforementioned Gurren Lagann than they are to Eva. The other reason they are divided is because they argue that the changes are destroying the precious canon of Evangelion, warping it so that events that we know in later moments or even in End of Evangelion, may never happen. There are arguments against this, like "This was not meant to be a shoot by shoot remake" and "Stop complaining you insufferable elitist" but there are much more compelling arguments which I can't say because of spoilers, but their complaints basically boil down to how the story is not just retelling what we already know and that some of the fights are just too cool.
The reason why the fights look so damn cool is because animation and art, both hand drawn and CG both compliment them, making them super sharp and beautiful, and the soundtrack is doing what it does best, which is remaking the original soundtrack and blast it at us so much that we fall out of our chairs in awe and amazement. Even the new songs sound so good that I thought my ears were just going to detach themselves and live next to soundtrack until the end of time. What I found most shocking in terms of the animation was that the CG never gets in the way of the hand drawn animation, which is brilliant and shows that the animation department knew what they were doing. What's more, it seems they even got an even bigger budget to make this movie, probably from the success of the first film, so in a change of tone completely from what Evangelion is accustomed to, the animation is so far getting better as we go through this series.
I am struggling to find things to hate, dislike or even to object to in this film, and there are so many things I want to talk about, even something that could be earth shattering to the very series that started this, despite this is apparently a new continuity. All in all, this is a fantastic film, and one that no-one should miss. People who never watched the original series and instead went straight to these movies will find that there is a lot to take in terms of story, but rest assured that there are a lot of elements that even the most knowledgeable of Evangelion geeks can not decipher. This film cements the fact that the series should remain to be watched, as Hideaki Anno may just start the anime event of a lifetime...again.
