Hideaki Anno

(Netflix Streaming, March 2020) I was a bit amazed to see The End of Evangelion occasionally pop up on the IMDB Top-250 list, and that amazement is likely to persist now that I’ve actually seen the movie. Not being all that familiar with the Evangelion series, it took me a few minutes and some extracurricular reading to get up to speed—not that there’s much to it: Earth is threatened, but it’s up to a few moody teenagers in robot suits to save the world. Whatever, anime, you do your thing. Considering that I would never be able to fully understand the film as a finale to the Neon Genesis Evangelion 24-episode anime series, I sat back and let it all wash over me. This, in the end, was the correct approach—trying to explain just what’s going on in The End of Evangelion is doomed to failure and would sound like insane gibberish even if I succeeded. The very short version is: it’s the final showdown, there’s a lot of barely understandable sights and sounds, and the entire thing hovers at the edge of symbolic unintelligibility. It’s violent, surreal, pompous, experimental, incoherent, apocalyptic, metaphysical and when you’re dealing with those qualifiers in rapid succession, who really cares about understanding the plot? Writer-director Hideaki Anno is a madman, but I’m happy he wasn’t stopped: The End of Evangelion is actually rather impressive in its own way—and if you’re going to justify including it as an occasional visitor to the IMDB Top-250, it might as well because it’s the most anime-esque of all anime—it’s difficult to imagine anyone ever doing something like this ever again. Would I recommend it? I have no clue.