I saw this earlier this week and finally was able to suss out my thoughts on the matter to some extent. There's so much so unpack here so I'm gonna hit the stuff that sticks out to me. I also rewatched the 3 movies before over 24 hours so I could remember what the hell was going on...and I was still lost at times.
Obviously spoilers everywhere.
So after a very LONG fucking development cycle (I hadn't met my wife when 3.33 came out. Now I have a 4 year old kid), this film is finally out for the world to see. Overall it's Satisfying and does bring everything to a close. However, that comes with the caveat of it being all over the place with a number of highs and lows that makes it difficult to judge.
So picking up more or less immediately after 3.33, there's a rather cool Intro sequence where Wunder shows up a creepy red and lifeless Paris France, and a team of techs/bridge bunnies in spacesuits/hazard suits disembark via a flying submarine thing onto a big weird black monolith thing in the middle of the city and start doing something. In the meantime, a bunch of creepy-looking automated Eva/Angel Hybrids from the now Evil NERV show up to poop on their party so Mari ends up playing defense from the techs in a very interesting looking battle sequence until they can finish whatever they're doing. Eventually Mari wipes out the invaders and the techs activate the monolith which basically restores Paris to being normal looking, and reveals Paris was basically another barrier/fortress city like Tokyo 3 and has a ton of spare parts and weapons that used to belong to Nerv for them to rebuild, repair and rearm the Evas(which is good considering they lost Unit 2 at the end of the last film). Which is weird because there was no indication Angels were ever going to attack anywhere but Tokyo. It also introduces this new Anti-LCL(?) monolith stuff that apparently is also alien tech that just so happens to have never been mentioned before but apparently is required for people to actually live on the surface.
Afterwards, the movie settles down into a much slower arc about the 3 kids wandering out of the alien ruins of Tokyo 3, having lost their Evas, on foot and apparently it's fine? Presumably the Red areas are uninhabitable and that's why they need the big barrier monoliths(thus the hazard suits in the Paris scene) but these 3 are okay to just hoof it out because of reasons or something. They're picked up and taken to a quaint little town in the countryside which is being protected from the encroachment by said monoliths, where a number of characters they went to school with have been living, farming and raising families. It's slow but rather chill and wholesome and for a while I swore someone stuck a Studio Ghibli movie inside of this Evangelion film. It provides some much needed breathing room to just decompress and emphasize that life is still going on in some places. It's also important because, due to the extreme trauma Shinji has been through in the past 2 films, he's finally broken and is somewhere between extremely depressed, full on PTSD and catatonic for a while, basically huddling in a corner and vomiting every time he sees Asukas bomb collar(apparently all the Eva pliots get one, not just him. Thanks for not explaining that, Wille/Misato).
I also rather appreciated the fact it cast focus on Shinji's slow recovery from the PTSD/Catatonia/Depression resulting from pretty much everything he's been through in the past few movies. This kid has lost pretty much everything, almost everyone hates him, he has no one to talk to, and as someone who has suffered from depression before(albeit not nearly that bad), I totally felt for the poor guy here. While the movie might be moving a bit fast on his recovery for the sake of pacing(lets face it, shinji probably needed years of therapy he's likely never gonna get to be a remotely healthy person after all that), it was nice to show that progression and create a sense of hope for him and the rest of the movie by extension.
It was also nice to have Rei, who was basically a doll before at NERV HQ, starting to become an actual person here through the process of learning like a toddler/small child does about life in the village, allowing to start developing her own life. Asuka....damn, Asuka, the movie is trying to make me feel sympathy for you, but then you go and stuff a bunch of food down Shinjis throat, which very well could have killed him and....I just can't fucking like you when you keep doing acting like an abusive *****. I empathize with....well, the fact she's apparently a clone or something and doesn't age anymore, but Shinji being your eternal torture target for no particular reason is not remotely fucking cool.
Once that's done, the movie shifts towards the final act, which is Willie and Wunder assaulting NERV HQ to stop Gendo from ending the world for real this time(as opposed to Shinji's previous aborted two attempts, which I guess are now 3rd and 4th impact, or maybe 3rd Impact, 3rd times the charm). And this si where the movie becomes fucking jammed packed with stuff so much that it becomes really hard to follow at times. There's big action scenes, new terms and concepts are tossed at the viewer left and right, there's a ton of cribbing from EoE(God Help you if you didn't watch that first) that makes the whole thing feel a bit messy and insane and just a bit bloated. At one point I looked at the time left, thinking they were coming up on the end and realized there was still like 45 min left).
Aside from being just so full of shit at the end, it's the fact that even if you have watched the series ( and EOE ) and more or less can follow what's going on there AND have watched the previous movies enough to have some idea what's going on up to 4.0, it still doesn't matter. You're still pretty much screwed in knowing what the fucking hell is going on at least half the time, because now you've got all this new stuff that doesn't seem to follow the same rules at all and I'm assuming this is all following some sort of actual logic in Anno's brain.
There's plenty of references to EOE but now you've got shit like Imaginary Lilith (or whatever her name is) and the other universe and I mean, it's just a lot. It really is. Asuka has a tiny monolith under her eyepatch and then she turns into an angel? WTF is that all about? Ritsuko mentions NERV has a 4th battleship? You couldn't have brought that up earlier? Vessels of Adam? And apparently there are 4 adams at 2nd Impact now? Like, I know this series has LOST levels of not explaining shit but since the last act is like a bunch of crazy action shit and throwing this stuff out, like I feel like there's a bunch of explanations that should be in the movie but isn't. It's like EOE on steroids.
Speaking of EOE, I do need to address the elephant in the room that this is riffing a LOT on EOE, even down to certain events(though in this case Ritsuko puts a bullet in Gendo rather than the other way around, which was a nice touch). At the end you get a particular sequence where Impact starts due to Gendo kicking it off and Shinji following him into the whole....thing to stop him. Which leads to what's essentially him and Gendo talking it out to let Shinji bring the whole thing to an end.
What's interesting here is that since Shinji has finally managed to reach some stability in this emotional state after recovering from his depression/PTSD somewhat earlier, he's able to finally deal with his dad and come to term with his abusive behaviour while Gendo finally opens to and talks to his son, perhaps more than he ever did in the entire series up till now. Considering the events and the fact they seem to he happening in a context, not unlike the end of the series, it feels like a subtle confirmation of the theory that EOE and eps 25+26 happen more or less at the same time to some extent(or more accurately, eps 25/26 happen during the "Komm Susser Tod" sequence from EOE). But more improtantly, it FINALLY fucking resolves Shinji getting to deal with his dad head on, something that was never really resolved in the original series/EOE. So Shinji is able to close the book on that and rewrite reality from a position of optimism/confidence rather than being utterly broken by Gendos A+ Parenting skills and everything else going on.
With that out of the way, there's a couple other things I wanted to touch on. While not the focus of the movie, the reference Ritsuko makes to Evas being illegal(or as she puts it, in violation of the Vactican treaty, as if that matters now) as military weapons brings up the implications of Evas, particulary NERV's Evas are are fucking wierd as shit and very Angel-looking, being common battlefield tools is an interesting one. It reminds me of the Metal Gear Universe where by MGS4, Metal Gears, which were initially akin to doomsday weapons, are now Common Battlefield weapons, and the fact the Metal Gears and NERV Evas are essentially autonomous just drives home the comparison. The irony is that there's nobody left to use them on except Wille, because as far as I can tell none of the other governments exist anymore(and with 99% of humanity being dead, it's probably a moot point to begin with). I was also confused about Paris being a Barrier/Fortress City like Tokyo 3 but angels apparently never attack anywhere but Japan so what's the fucking point? Hell, there's an entire plot point in 2.0 about the Vatican Treaty preventing any nation from having more then 3 Evas which leads to that wierd thing where the US sends Japan one of their Evas so now Japan has to put Unit 2.0 in Storage because reasons, but why the hell do the other nations need Evas again if the whole point is to either fight Angels or...do SEELE's weird Black Magic Apocalypse shit. It would have been nice if any of this had been explained beyond "3 eva limit, we have to put Unit 2 in storage despite already having 3 functioning Evas".
I guess the other thing I should mention is how fucking ridiculous it is that apparently this is all part of Gendo/SEELE's plan. Shinji cares about Rei, Rei Gets eaten by Angel 9 and then Shinji Starts 3rd Impact to save her? Except then Kaworu stops it. But Shinji is manipulated by just letting Shinji go nanners into pulling the damn lances, which restarts 3rd/4th impact? But then Asuka/Mari stops that one. And finally, Gendo apparently lets Wille steal the Wunder and take Unit 01 and pull get to Unit 13 to restart 3rd/4th/5th impact again, but he also routinely tries to kill them all with his Eva army which would completely neglect the point because he needs other people to do it(Blow up the Wunder and you don't have your 4th battleship for your ritual thingy, Gendo. Ever think of that?). Not to mention how easy it could be for ANY of them to die and not be able to make the damn plan work(Shinji getting crushed by the Angel fight at the end of 2.0 would have basically fucked SEELE's plans pretty fucking hard).
I mean, there's 3d chess and then there's you getting damn lucky all the time because somehow your enemies do everything you need to do exactly how you need them to do it and it stops being amusing after a while. I honestly forget if Shinji was needed to do something to make Gendo's plan work in 4.0 but Asuka stuffing food down his throat could have ended that real fucking quick (Did I mention Asuka is the fucking worst, or would be except for Gendo). Gendo apparently did need Unit 01 yet again so presumably he needed Shinji? I mean, if Shinji had offed himself from the stress, would that have fucked SEELE hard due to losing the one guy who can operate Unit 01? I'm thinking way too hard about this, I'm sure.
Oh, and then there's the whole thing about Kaji apparently stopping 3rd Impact? When the fuck did this happen? It looked like it was Kaworu with the damn lance who did it. How the hell Kaji did anything like that is never shown but they just keep acting like it's a thing. They do mention something about him using Wunder as a seed bank to preserve life on earth, so maybe that's what they really meant or something, but that's not the same as saving 3rd impact and doesn't matter if the world is contaminated with LCL/Angel Blood/Red.
Overally, I found this overall Satisfying to bring the rebuild films to a close and wrap up a fair bit of both the series themes and arc but also the rebuild series. Since it's impossible not to compare this to EOE, I would argue EOE was much more focused and generally easier to follow, but this film(while being kinda all over the place near the end and arguably a bit overlong) has the advantage of not being a 90 minute parade of misery and depression that EOE was, partially because 3.0 already covered that ground and this shows Shinji finally recovering. Instead, Rebuild 4 at least has some hope that things will eventually get better and Shinji is finally reaching a state of stability and self worth, which yeah, is essentially the big key to making the meta as fuck ending work but you know what, I'll take it over waking up on a desolate beach with a complete asshole and presumably wondering what the fuck they're gonna eat in a few hours becasuse the earth is a lifeless hellscape full of angel corpses.
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