Rebuild of Evangelion 3.33(what's with these numbers, seriously dude?): You can (not) redo.
So this is where the film series really takes a left turn from the anime. It starts off with a space battle, with Units 2 and....whatever the fuck unit Mari has, in orbit trying to retrieve Unit 1, which apparently made it into Orbit somehow after the last movie. Inside they retrieve Shinji, who has effectively been in stasis for the last 14 years and bring him the Wunder, a massive flying battleship run by Wille, an organization who opposes NERV, who are now the bad guys. So it turns out that Shinji basically kicked off the Apocylype/3rd Impact like in EoE, but was stopped before it could fully take, so instead of everyone becoming Tang in the original film, only 99% of humanity was, with a number of important characters being spared to survive the living hell that followed.
Shinji has a bomb collar placed around his neck and told never to get in an Eva again because of what happened last time. Except, nobody really tells him much of anything. Everyone all kinda talks around him, despite his repeated pleas to explain just what the fuck is going on. Asuka shows up just to try to punch him and then leaves, but for a good 10-15 minutes everyone just gives Shinji the silent "You know what you did" treatment, leaving the poor kid to wonder just why everyone seems to hate him now. He barely realizes 14 years have passed because people are a bit older but no one tells him "Yeah, you pretty much killed 99% of humanity and made much of the world uninhabitable thanks to your stunt in Unit 01" which would have gone a long way to making sure he didn't get in an eva again, probably. Instead, everyone just says he's not allowed to pilot but not WHY.
So when Rei shows up and Jailbreaks him from Wunder, Shinji jumps at the chance is taken to NERV HQ, which is now a decaying ruin inhabited by Gendo, Rei, Fuyutsuki and Kaworu. It's also a fully automated factory dedicated to producing a metric told of evas that are also disturbingly similar to the angels they've long since defeated and act as Gendos private military, being sent out to harass Willie. It's here Shinji finally finds out what happened 14 years ago and that Rei is just one of many clones, which drives him over the edge and eventually try to undo his mistake. And because both Fate and Gendo both fucking hate this kid, he ends up nearly triggering the apocalypses again.
The middle of the film inside NERV is arguably the least liked(or most hated) part of this film, mostly because it's very slow and not much really happens. It feels like a arthouse film in it's minimalism, and knowing not much happens made it easier to appreciate it because I was aware it was gonna be long and slow and just went with it. What it does well is being extremely atmospheric. NERV is now a cold, almost lifeless place of machines and ruin in the middle of a wasteland that used to be Tokyo 3. The massive nature of the facility seen only serves to enhance this sense of isolation, lonieness and decay now that pretty much nobody lives or works there anymore. It also leads to a particularly powerful moment where Kaworu takes shinji outside to see the world of the future and he gets to soak in it's full silent desolation. Yes, it's not unlike what we saw at the end of EoE but because we're given a chance to Linger on it and Shinji finally realizes this was all his doing, despite his best intentions to save Rei at the end of the last film, it hits hard and should be given more credit for showing just why everyone in Willi fucking hates him now. It doesn't invalidate my criticism of nobody fucking attempting to explain this but it does work very well as a full gut punch to Shinji and eventually setting the stage for him to almost fuck everything up even more at the end.
One of the more interesting things I learned when looking into this was that the original plan apparently was very different when the final version, considering the trailers at the end of 2.22. Supposedly 90%ish percent of the film was rewritten during the development hell of this production and the time skip wasn't supposed to happen until near the end. The other thing that does a lot to explain just what happened here is that Anno, who had previously struggled with depression during the production of the series, had a full on relapse of depression around this time, apparently not coming into the studio for a full year at one point and becoming downright suicidal. And by god, knowing that explains a lot of the sheer bleakness of Rebuild 3.33 and the direction it went it.
I do think 3.33 is the weakest of the 4 films but don't hate it. I do admire the fact it was made at all considering Anno having a fucking mental breakdown, and the fact it went in a very different direction then I think anyone imagined it going and making it kinda work. Yes, it has way to much angsty piano sessions and it does drag a bit in the middle but does manage to get something out of that as well. Probably the worst thing, IMHO is that this is the point you better have watched everything going on before it because this film ceases to hold your hand in any way, shape or form and pretty much just assumes you've been paying very close attention. At points it throws shit at you left and right and much of it isn't explained much if at all, so even series vets will no doubt be wondering what the fuck is happening(especially during the ending).
