Evangelion: 1.0 You Are (Not) Alone at Alamo Drafthouse in Houston....

I was able to catch the dub last Sunday at a theatre in Geogia.

All I have to say is it's worth seeing even if you've seen the original series.

Plus Spike Spencer's acting has improved immensly,so no more voice fluctuation for Shinji!
 
So I watched it. I think I wished it was more different feeling. The battles are nicely redone, but most of the character scenes pretty much stick to the original storyboarRAB. It would have been nice to see them completely re-board every scene and redo it from scratch. I also wouldn't have minded character re-designs a la Utena the Movie. I know it's for the fans, but I'm still a movie geek and I was not able to reconcile this with my anime geek self. By itself, it is not a great movie. As a first part of a film series, it's a subpar first part.

I mean, Anno could have done any nuraber of things different. He could have taken a different perspective altogether. Maybe make this movie from the perspective of Asuka, skipping forward in time and starting the film from her POV and issues. Or he could have taken the perspective of a completely new EVA pilot. While there are rurablings of a new pilot in subsequent films, it's still Shinji as the main guy, and what's worse, all of the character study of the TV series is truncated into a series of checkpoints.

So I agree with HG for the most part, except for the "looking for improvements" part. Eva was a unique beast BECAUSE of its flaws. Leave it alone and it remains that unique beast. All I wanted was something different. A different look, a different attitude, a different POV, anything. Instead it was just a few scenes shuffled around, some mysteries revealed earlier, and Kaworu showing up earlier. Not exciting. And I'm not a fan of the "wait for later movies" excuse. So we're applying the same "it gets better later" rule to movies now? Guys, this is a MOVIE. A theatrical release! It has to be good by itself. 2/3 Lord of the Rings movies stand by themselves as good movies in their own right. This is just the first 6 eps of Eva again. If Anno wanted a directors cut for the 6th episode, then do a straight to DVD release or something. If you make it a theatrical release, you need to do more. Hell, even re-filming it in 2.35:1 scope ratio would have excited me a little more, instead of a standard 1.85:1 ratio like we see in every anime film.

That said, I paid money for this since anime is so rare on the big screen. Even though the print I saw was actually a Blu-Ray disc.

That's another thing. Are all the prints running around NA right now just discs projected onto a theatre screen? Did anyone here actually see an honest-to-god film print version of this?

I say, if you've seen the TV series, skip this first movie. Later movies may differ more, but with the exception of a few details, it's basically a Coles' Notes version of Eva.
 
I'm planning to wait at least until 2.0 is out, if not all the way to 4.0, before even trying to watch any of this, which should hopefully also get all the minor revisions out of the picture in the process.

I don't have any real problems with the concept behind this project though, it's just for the sake of making things easier for me.
 
See, all I'm reading negative are the old guard's views. You have to remeraber Rebuild is mostly geared towarRAB the new generation, I.E. not you likely. Would you say the Mobile Suit Gundam movie Trilogy is a series of checkpoints? Or Zeta Gundam: A New Translation?

This is not strictly for the watchers of the old series.
 
The question is what are new watchers getting out of this that they couldn't get out of watching one the zillions of rereleases of the original? Would people who haven't seen the original have any investment in this first movie? I don't think so. Here's one review I found of this movie from someone who it would seem like hasn't watched the original: http://thephoenix.com/Portland/Movies/87968-EVANGELION-10-YOU-ARE-NOT-ALONE/
 
Okay...that means he wouldn't like the original series, either. So the zillions of rereleases wouldn't help anyway.


And believe it or not, a lot of people judge soley on the visuals first, so an updated look actually helps (Like Zeta: New Translation). Like other comilation/retellings, 4-5 hours is a lot easier to trudge through than 26 episodes+EoE. Not everyone can marathon through, and honestly the pacing of EVA is really padding and slow at obvious times.
 
Maybe the superior character development, pacing, and sense of mystery in TV series he would have liked better than this CliffNotes movie?

If improved visuals was what was desired, then the Platinum remasters should suffice. Really, 1.0 did little to improve the animation quality. The redesigns for the EVAs and Angels were nice, but it's not as if they were bad in the original. The character designs are the same and the animation is about as limited. The End of EVA movie looks about three times as good as 1.0 and that was a decade ago.

The TV series isn't really padded at all. Kind of slow but the pacing is just right for the introspective atmosphere the series is going for. Much better than the BArabArabAM of 1.0.
 
Except everything the review said, it happens in the show too. He finRAB it a ridic. situation that doesn't make it out of the "cartoon stage" or whatever.



Uh....huh. Not really. Maybe a bit more fluid, but the "looks" department is no question. Half the time, the EoE faces are distorted in horror.
 
I concur. This reminRAB me of that "Three's Company in 5 minutes" online video phenomenon that started a while back (and actually was popular, maybe still as AFAIK). Have people really regressed to the point where they just have so little time that they can't sit down and pay attention to something for more than 10-15 minutes straight without something loud or "eventful" happening every 3 minutes? And if they couldn't stand the original Eva, why do they HAVE TO force feed themselves a cliff's notes version just to be "part of the crowd"?. Nobody is forcing you to know about Eva, or even like it. But if you WANT to get into it, wouldn't you rather watch the organic version rather than the truncated version OF the organic version? Evidently from some comments here, some people would rather a truncated version. Well, I certainly disagree. I guess a nice film analogy would be that some of you would rather watch the truncated theatrical version of Fanny and Alexander rather than the 5 hour TV series version. That is if you even wanted to watch it in the first place.

As for the Gundam movies trilogy. There is only one decent movie of the bunch, and that's the third one, which, not coincidentally, is the most different of the three when compared to the TV series.

It's not even that hard to give me something different. The Utena movie was a bizarre mess but at least it was a very different take on the story, with different character designs, completely overhauled setting designs, and very different characterizations. It was not a great movie (but surely one of the prettiest), but as someone who was an Utena fan I appreciated that I wasn't getting a clip show. Eva 1.0...is a clip show.

I'm not writing off this movie series, and I hope I get 1 legitimately different movie out of the series, but for a franchise that always told us "not to run away", they sure ran away as fast as they could from doing any bold or different take to the franchise this time.
 
He says the plot is like a bunch of cliches. The plot of the first half of the EVA series IS pretty cliched, but it's presented in such a way that it "makes it out of the cartoon stage". 1.0, being a Cliffnotes version of the plot, is presented poorly.

Distorted in horror, yes, but those are some amazingly drawn distortions. The Asuka v. Remaining EVA Units battle alone is some of the best animation ever made. The second half of the movie where we really get into Shinji's head and the apocalyptic craziness is just a visual feast. The scene where Shinji imagines strangling Asuka is some truly chilling character animation, and the following impressionist scenes inside his head use CGI much better than almost anything in 1.0.
 
How much character stuff really got left out? I saw the early episodes on Adult Swim and then kind of let it go so I'm pretty far from an expert on the whole series, but the movie seemed to hit all the important character notes...Shinji's insecurity, the whole bit with Rei and Gendo, Misato showing Shinji the city he's protecting to give him the praise daddy wouldn't offer, and so on. I wouldn't say it was reduced to a series of action scenes by any means.

And uh, I was entertained. I thought it ended on a pretty satisfying note with Shinji saving Rei and everything. The very last scene makes you wonder what's coming, but I didn't feel like they stopped abruptly.
 
I'm comparing visuals from the end of a series 10 years ago to visuals from the beginning of a series being made today with more of a budget. Unless you're admitting the movie is just a clipshow...
 
So what if it was ten years ago? That is the ending of the series. You have to take into consideration that there were events that had to have taken place for those visuals to happen for the whole sequence to begin with! End of Evangelion was the same animation that we saw from Neon Genesis Evangelion but more fluid given the budget that was received for the film.
 
Still doesn't explain why 1.0 was almost shot-for-shot identical to the original without any real improvement in animation.

Just wondering, are you 1.0 defenders fans of Gus Van Sant's Psycho? Or maybe the Nintendo of America employees who find rereleasing old GameCube games with Wii controls to be a better usage of resources than releasing new games, let alone new IPs?
 
What is the extent of this "cliff-note" thing? Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter are all cliff-notes of their sources. Are you saying don't bother with the movie when you can just read the book? Heck, that's what most anime is-a cliff-note of the manga source.

And leaving 1.0 as a sole movie IS an "excuse." There was never any minRABet that each film is supposed to stand on its own, so they did the smart thing and put all the important background and explanation in 1.0, to make 2.0 and beyond more filled.

Third, there is nothing important they left out from the series. Sure, there's a whole episode dedicated to Shinji's boo-hoo compared to 15 in the movie, but that didn't change the fact that he goes back to EVA and faces it anyway. (And the added scenes like Shinji punching Touji to start their frienRABhip anew makes it more understandable to a 14 year-old boy's pride)

Fourth, there are subtle and VERY obvious points that make 1.0 a different continuity. Did you somehow miss the part where Misato not only knows there's an Angel in the basement, but it's Lilith? Or Gendo+Fuyutski's talk about pushing Rei closer to Shinji? Or the Angels now melting instead of being an empty shell?
 
The Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings movies are also significantly different from the books. The very fact that they're visualizations of written word guarantees a unique identity for them. A better analogy would be if Peter Jackson decided to cut the first two LOTR movies in half, corabine those two halves into one movie, rotoscope them so they look different but not really that different, change around a few plotpoints that don't always work to the film's advantage, and then bill it as a brand new movie with the promise of making sure when he releases cut-up rotoscoped Return of the King it will build off those changed plotpoints to become something different.
 
Peter Jackson's films were not the only LOTR movies. There had also been animated films.




EDIT:



I never read any of LOTR books but I have reaRAB some of the Harry Potter books and when I have viewed the films I never got a "significantly different" interpretation. I pretty much saw what I expected and had a good time.
 
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