Well, uh, that certainly was something. I don't particularly feel trolled by Anno in the end, rather I feel like I witnessed what happens when individual good ideas are mashed together without any sense of elegance.
The biggest problem I have is so much of the movie could have been averted had someone, anyone, communicated the current situation to Shinji who is apparently characterized as Shinji with a spine early on and could have accepted the scenario. Instead it seems like bad storytelling to purposefully isolate him for the sake of making him susceptible to Kaworu who ironically ends up being the person most kind to him in the end. At that point though, Shinji was in TV series angst mode and deaf to even Kaworu's pleas.
There's a lot of bad to go around in this. Visually, I thought this was a mess and had trouble processing what was going on in some scenes. The CG was terrible and invasive beyond what I would have believed anyone could have told me it was, that airship was offensive in the sense it seemed to eschew the elegant mechanical designs of the tv series for the sake of having a sky whale, everyone seems like a caricature of themselves, and every event in this feels entirely superfluous to the grand scheme of things despite Gendo's assertion that certain things had advanced.
That said, I did like some elements. Time skip? I think that's a great followup to the ending Third Impact stuff of 2.22. It showed that event carried great consequence to it assuming it's true given Kaworu neglecting to tell Shinji his role in it. Speaking of which, I really liked Kaworu becoming hesitant toward the end of his role. Between the TV series and the movies, him showing doubt or hesitation was something I would have never once considered so it was a pleasant surprise. I also liked the Unit 2 777 mode (I think?) as it seemed to be a natural evolution of the feral qualities of a berserking Eva and hinted at the level of control the pilots had over the units now. I didn't even mind the idea of Misato's grudge against the Evas finally consuming her but couldn't stand how it was actually portrayed. Just neat things that weren't executed well, sadly.
If this had been handled with more care, I could have seen myself really getting into it as at times I felt myself actually caring about events taking place rather than the usual checking to see how much runtime was left. It's just disappointing to get a bad movie that takes itself far too seriously and abandons qualities that defines a franchise simply just because.
