Highly overrated...

thestudent32

I went into Evangelion with high expectations.  "This is great stuff," I'd been told.  "It's deep and philosophical.  You'll really care about the characters.  The plot is wonderful."

So, I sat and I watched it.

And I thought to myself, "Wow.  Is there no one with the courage to say what they really think?"

I do not understand why people found this interesting, I really don't. Characters you care about?  Hardly.  I found most of the characters flat and uninteresting collections of neuroses, whining fourteen-year-olds in huge robots.  "Will Shinji grow a backbone?"  I found myself unable to care.

Then came the EVAs themselves, and their opponents the Angels.

The concept, quite frankly, isn't what I would call high art.  In fact, it sounds more like something a kid would come up with.  "Yeah, they're these robots, and they're really cool because they bleed when they get hurt, but they're not really mecha, but captured angels, so sometimes they go crazy and don't do what the pilots want, and they have to be plugged in..."

Needless to say, I was less than impressed with the concept.  This could have been forgiven, though, had the animation been exceptionally impressive (it was decent, but not incredible) or the plot engaging (the depth, in my opinion, is pure sophistry designed to appeal in the same sort of pseudo-philosophical way that the Matrix did) or if the mecha combat against the Angels had been particularly impressive.  This last is perhaps the greatest failing.  I'm sorry, but I found it particularly lame when one EVA *strangled* another.  Mecha should not strangle each other.  Another incident was that of a 'sniper rifle' that required the blackout of an entire nation to power it, but had to be compensated for the rotation of the earth, and a rather trite explanation constructed just to give the animator an excuse to show the EVA chambering a second round in the rifle.

The Angels?  I'm afraid that they weren't particularly nifty, either.  It felt, at some points, like a re-run of Voltron, with a different random Angel monster every other episode.  Why were they called Angels?  So far as I could tell, there wasn't really any reason for it.  Just accept it and move on, the series tries to tell you, but if a series is going to be 'deep,' it cannot skip out on such an important element.  And that's just one of the many holes that is supposed to add to the series.

The end of the series was particularly unsatisfying, to say the least.

With Evangelion, the sheer banality of the characters absolutely drenches the series.  Most should have been in therapy, not piloting giant robots. While flawed characters can be interesting, and in fact are the best kind, that does not mean that all flawed characters are interesting.  This series is a case in point.

To conclude, I found Neon Genesis: Evangelion to be an overrated mess, with little to recommend it aside from a lot of hype.  Some might dismiss me as a Philistine for saying it, but I think that any series should stand on its own merits, and should give the viewer something to grab onto and be interested in within a half-dozen episodes.  Quite frankly, it was like getting teeth pulled, watching the entire series. I was hoping for something that would justify the effort, but I didn't find it.  Maybe others will, but I did not.

score /10

thestudent32 23 October 2001

Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw0354155/