So I just returned from one of the last screenings of Evangelion: 1.0 You Are (Not) Alone in New York City and I must say, I am incredibly let down by what I watched. When I say that only the most diehard of Evangelion fans will enjoy this, I mean it.
The film is a revamp of the anime show, working with a much larger budget that does show, as the animation value is absolutely beautiful and the Eva mechs, Tokyo-3 and my favorite, the Third Angel, are all something to be desired by any mech fan and creator, but watching a movie that is pretty can’t make up for one that lacked any sort of sympathetic characters or deviation from the original work. The movie really offered no growth or new concepts in regards to the cast, it spent too much time following Shinji, who did nothing but complain and whine, exactly like in the show, which I was hoping from the bottom of my heart would change. What I suppose, from a character creating point of view, frustrated me the most was that Shinji kept crying that he was no good at being an Eva pilot, but took out three Angels in a row and did so without any severe bodily harm or devastating mechanical destruction, so he had no reason to keep singing that same tune, which came to be nearly unbearable by the end.
The story suffered terribly from the telling and not showing, notion, where Misato and Ritsuko would just narrate large chunks of the film, filling in the viewer with information they don’t need, which I feel if they had cut back on and actually shown the characters doing, would have been much more interesting. Their monologues became white noise by the debut of the Sixth Angel.
Besides those weaknesses in the plot itself, the English dub was absolutely terrible. I’ve been told it was regarded highly by the audience at Anime Expo, but no matter how I tilt my head, I can’t see how the English cast ever deserved the praise it received. The dubbing sounded like it had no direction, more like some various people were just put in front of microphones and read lines with absolutely no feeling, emotion or interest in the project itself. From the moment Shinji spoke his first line, I knew it couldn’t go anywhere but down and boy did it. Misato was flat, boring, Ritsuko was worse, as was Gendo Ikari. Frankly, the only actress that got away with sounding empty was Brina Palencia as Rei, because Rei is an emotionless girl at her introduction.
My New York City audience was quite small but dedicated and as the credits rolled, we all seemed equally disappointed. As a side note, here’s a funny story about my personal viewing experience, which has no negativity directed at the film itself, but the actual theatre. They played the entire movie with the wrong color tint, so skin was blue, blood was purple, Rei’s hair was orange, Angel cores were blue, and classmates all had a green tone to them. If that couldn’t be more of a kick in the face to the audience who paid over twelve dollars per ticket, in the middle of one of battles, the projector shut off and remained off for several minutes. Finally, after one of the viewers had complained and got them to turn it back on, they didn’t even rewind so we could find out what was missed! Luckily, all of us were given free movie passes to make up for their huge fault.
Has anyone else seen the film? Consensus?
