880https://magicplanetanimedesign.files.wordpress.com/2021/08/uxzj6in.jpg SPECIAL WARNING: This review contains extensive spoilers for the reviewed material and assumes familiarity with it and the remainder of the Neon Genesis Evangelion franchise. In a very real sense this is the end of something. Neon Genesis Evangelion has existed as a series since 1995. Long before it became a franchise as such there were those original episodes and the films that followed them most famously End of Evangelion. The Rebuild movies always controversial serve as a way to rewrite and redefine Evangelion which has remained true through the rocky first the astonishing second and the burnedblack emotionally deadened third entries in the series. That Thrice Upon a Time the fourth and final will spawn mountains upon mountains of discourse is only natural. This is Eva. One can talk forever about its influences and its impact but there is nothing else that is truly like it. Twentysix years of history come to a stop here. Welcome to the end of an era. Lets start not at the beginning but at the end. After the harrowing of the soul that was You Can Not Redo Thrice Upon a Time concludes as the only iteration of the Evangelion series to receive a wholly unambiguous happy ending. There is no room for confusion here. Shinji Ikari is all grown up and accordingly this movie will make you weep like a proud parent on graduation day. For a certain kind of Eva fan this is a claim to be met with skepticism. Eva derives no small part of its immense reputation from being a truly withering underthemicroscope look at depression. But its important to clarify our terms here: Thrice Upon a Time does not rob Eva of that accolade it reinforces it. After twentysix years of spiraling Thrice assures even those of us in the darkest pits of misery that yes there is a way out of this. As a kind of antiEnd of Evangelion it is an open window disguised as a trap door. 880https://i.ur.com/967eayO.jpg Which is to say having a happy ending and being a happy movie are two different things. Getting to that ending is quite the ride a fact only enhanced by Thrices incredible length clocking in at two and a half hours. Improbably it earns every second but one could be forgiven for wondering. After some actionfocused eye candy to start things off with a bang and which mostly stars Mari the film refocuses on its protagonist. We open with Shinji in nearcatatonic burnout. He is entirely nonverbal for the first forty minutes of the film and the first words anyone says to him are an accusation that he is a spineless loser. When at one point he gets a look at Asukas collar has a PTSD flashback and vomits on the spot. This just so you know is what were dealing with here. That he manages to in the course of only the films remaining 110 minutes go from there to where he is by its finale is nothing short of astonishing. If Thrice Upon a Time did not have two and half decades of cachet to lean on here it probably wouldnt work. Over the course of Thrice Upon a Time we see Shinji make sustained andthis is key herepermanent character growth for arguably the first time ever. His character actually changing in a sustained way the way ones character is supposed to change as they grow up rather than simply shifting. Where You Can Not Redo seemed to bitterly mock the very idea of ever growing as a person at all Thrice demonstrates that its possible with nothing more than some genuine care. Village 3 the town of survivors that Shinji Asuka and one of Reis clones are based in for the first third or so of the film is a place where people are forced by the aftermath of the nearThird Impact disaster to work together. 880https://i.ur.com/HQwoF2e.jpg It is in this environment shepherded by two of his old friends the nowadult Kensuke and Touji that Shinji is finally able to make real positive changes to himself. Village 3 shows Shinji what he does not have. His friends have become adults started families and in the way that their circumstances dictate become healthy and productive people. Shinji has none of that and although he never says as much out loud its clear even early on in the film that hes keenly aware of it. 880https://i.ur.com/Sl8QzJF.jpg But hes not alone here. Asuka stands at a distance from Village 3as she always has from everyoneand the Clone Rei nave as a newborn rapidly integrates into it only for her to die near the films onethird mark. This could easily send Shinji spiraling but the fact that she appears to die happy seems to spark something inside him which Kensuke in particular helps nurture and this becomes the catalyst for his growth. 880https://i.ur.com/ITkzHUt.jpg Its tempting to map out his entire emotional journey here but a fair amount of it feels so natural that doing so could be an article unto itself. If we skip ahead to near the films climax where Shinji is suddenly not only able to face Gendo but do so unafraid you could be forgiven for thinking a natural transition impossible. Yet it simply does there is no explanation for it beyond the builtup credibility of Shinjis long history as a character. They make sense because hes Shinji. Further in the middle stretch or so of the film is a clash of dazzling surrealities. Massive battleships slug it out in conceptual spaces nonce terms like The Key of Nebuchadnezzar The Golgotha Object and The AntiUniverse gain biblical significance fitting their names. 880https://i.ur.com/SodIgg8.jpg Its all wonderful and all Extremely Anime in the genericized sense of the term that commentators like myself tend to avoid using. Explosions giant robots and monsters incomprehensibly vast scales of combat and of course the plethora of proper nouns. Asuka pulls a plotsignificant item out of her eye at one point you get the idea. Rarely is this done as well as its done here. Somehow all of the disparate parts make perfect sense and one would not be wrong to invoke one of Evas own successors in the feeling of how. There really is a bit of Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann in it. 880https://i.ur.com/xMYyg6m.jpg 880https://i.ur.com/Y7GI74I.jpg 880https://i.ur.com/ubzsXPc.jpg But yes the key thing. Shinji fights Gendo. He fights Gendo bravely and while wholly accepting himself and this lets him question his father in a meaningful way for the first time. As the twos bout turns from physical to conversational Gendo reveals what weve all known all along. He is beneath his monstrous acts beneath his abuse beneath the mad scientist and wouldbe godslayer a deeply lonely man willing to go to inhumanly great lengths to see his late wife again. The most evil men tend to be simple and Gendo is no exception. Shinji defeating Gendo is an entire generation conquering shared trauma. The sort of solidarity that is direly needed in an era as grim as ours and the sort that means even more coming from Evangelion than it might almost any other series. 880https://i.ur.com/ug8f4jz.jpg Its prudent to take an aside here to say that the film is of course not perfect. There are faults to be found but theyre minor and mostly on the production side. Studio Kharas CGIheavy live action filminfluenced visual style has always been divisive and it will never be moreso than it is here putting the capstone on what is far and away their most wellknown series. For my money Id say it works in some contexts better than others. Truly disturbing and otherworldly imagery like Asukas loss against Unit 13 or a bizarrely photorealistic haunting echo of End of Evangelions floating Rei are excellent. 880https://i.ur.com/a8qmSy0.jpg 880https://i.ur.com/2rV9EBS.jpg In other places especially in certain battle scenes one cant escape the feeling that theres a grandiosity that these fights should have that they dont always quite pull off. Mostly in the form of the sheer scale of the actors involvedespecially the battleshipsnot always coming through. Still these criticisms are easily offset by the other aforementioned visual merits. On a slightly more substantial level one could argue that limiting the films perspective to mostly Shinji limits its impact. The death of the Clone Rei relatively early on being the example I suspect many will glom onto. But I think this is the wrong tack to take. Shinji despite everything has been all of us. Which is not to say he is all of us. Some folks even some who love Evangelion dearly have left that particularly dark phase of our mental illnesses long behind us. But we have all been back there where every room is suffocating and any activity is a distraction from our minds attempt to eat itself. And the fear of going back there of possibly hurting yourself or worse hurting others is very real. Which is the exact thing that makes it so cathartic when pushing back against twentysix years of history his own initial characterization and the countless reductionist depictions of the character as a spineless wimp Shinji wins. The Son finally understanding his Father vanquishes him without further struggle. 880https://i.ur.com/KnemIOX.jpg The new world he creates as he is made able to do is not some perfect paradise. It is a world not unlike ours though I suspect perhaps a little brighter. Of course any distance between the two is a mere illusion. After such a long time clawing at ones own soul any daylight is welcome. If the films climax seems to leave some questions unanswered they simply dont feel relevant. Its Mari who pulls Shinji from his rapidlyfading sketch world into the new universe hes created. The ending scene depicts Shinji now an adult living a truly peacefully ordinary life. 880https://i.ur.com/x2XG2PW.jpg And so the Sun shines on a world without Evangelions and for us without Evangelion. I am reminded by Thrices finale not so much of any other piece of Eva media or indeed any of Gainaxs other marquee properties. Instead my mind turns to the finale of the largelyoverlooked Wish Upon The Pleiades. In that series finale which marked the end of Studio Gainaxs time as a going concern as a producer of TV anime no words are wasted on complicated overwrought goodbyes. Instead as here its simply on to the next. The next universe the next adventure the next dawn or if you prefer the neon genesis. 880https://i.ur.com/AJ1vgPc.jpg The final remarkable thing about Thrice Upon a Time is that it puts Neon Genesis Evangelion on the whole in the past and at the same time immortalizes it for the future. The end of an era but the beginning of a new day. It is over but it will be with us forever. Notes Disclaimers Usage of Anilists review feature does not constitute endorsement for Anilist as a platform the Anilist community or any individual member thereof or any of Anilists policies or rules. All views expressed are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons groups or organizations. All text is owned by me. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.