‘Evangelion: 3.0+1.01 Thrice Upon a Time’: The ideal closure

“Neon Genesis Evangelion” is Hideaki Anno’s magnum opus, the one that elevated him to one of the essential figures of Japanese animation; It also established him as one of the best exponents of the great creative moment that anime experienced in the 90s. Transformed into a cult series, its confusing ending led to the creation of the film “The End of Evangelion”, with which he is been given an alternate ending. Already become an important director, Anno has decided to re-explore his creation with “Rebuild of Evangelion”, a reinterpretation of his work, with which he has expanded it into a definitive tetralogy. which ended up turning fiction into a film saga that is gaining prestige.

The closure of ‘Rebuild of Evangelion’ is now coming to theaters with ‘Evangelion: 3.0+1.01 Thrice Upon a Time’. This is undoubtedly a highly anticipated moment for fans, as the fourth chapter arrives two years late, due to its previous release on Amazon Prime Video in August 2021, which has caused some concern among fans, who have seen the possibility of not finishing seeing their entire saga outside the streaming platform. Despite that previous debut, ‘Evangelion 4’ (which avoids referring to that number, as it is a symbol of bad luck in Japan) manages to have a commercial premiere in cinemas in a big way, as happened with recent sagas such as “Night Watch”, “Jujutsu Kaisen” or “Dragon Ball Super”.

There is an important nuance with ‘Thrice Upon a Time’, this fourth installment works much more autonomously than the previous three, which shows the fascinating process of emancipation of ‘Rebuild of Evangelion’ from the source material. If the first tape, released back in 2007, was a faithful reproduction of the first episodes of the original anime; the second began to make important changes compared to the subsequent chapters of the series; so that the third was already a complete break from the source material and the beginning of a new story; the fourth installment is the opportunity to delve into this new dimension of the franchise.

A farewell to the culmination of the legacy of ‘Evangelion’

So “Thrice Upon a Time” has the greatest virtue of functioning as both closure for veteran fans and an opportunity for lay audiences to delve into the saga for the first time. This balance is not easy to achieve and Anno, who writes the screenplay by himself but co-directs the film together with Kazuya Tsurumaki, Katsuichi Nakayama and Mahiro Maeda, achieves it thanks to a story that brings, once again, deep dialogues between its characters mixing with powerful action sequence visuals, in which the franchise reminds why it is one of the most important within the mecha subgenre.

What is fascinating is that the escalation of violence is perfectly dosed, in contrast to ‘You Are (Not) Alone’, ‘You Can (Not) Advance’ and ‘You Can (Not) Redo’, in the sense that it only appears in an epic and sensational way in its second part, taking advantage of the first to explore another approach to the personality of its protagonists, especially in the case of Rei. Finally, the religious symbology leaves in the middle a brutal parent-child confrontation, with which the origins of the main protagonists are exposed in depth; as well as the antagonistic desire of Shinji Ikari’s father, the backbone of the saga.

The result is that “Thrice Upon a Time” is the finishing touch that the saga needed. A magnificent feature film with a great sense of the epic, which does its job of closure while offering a fascinating visual spectacle, with the addition of having philosophical and psychological depths on the power of Humanity and the importance of the tangible versus ethereal. A production that finds its natural element in cinema.

Note: 8

The best: His final scenes have a very strong symbolic component and a style that evokes that of René Laloux in ‘The Savage Planet’.

Worse: On the other hand, it doesn’t stop having that feeling of confusion in the plot, so typical of the franchise.