Visuals: STUNNING. Extremely cool. You can see a lot of NGE reflected in the stylistic choices of contemporary anime. Example: the shot of Unit-01 all bandaged up and undergoing “repairs” deadass looks like a titan from Attack on Titan.

Holy pacing issues. The hour of navel-gazing in the last two episodes aside, there are a lot of scenes that really should have ended a minute or two later. I didn’t need to see Unit-01 sit there for two minutes before popping that kid’s head off.

Outside of the pacing, the broad strokes of the story are very cool. I can see where they had to cut a lot of corners for the sake of the budget, but what they were going for was awesome. They were trying to subvert some of the usual tropes of the genre by making the mechas not really mechas at all, but soulless clones of the same monsters they were trying to stop. And with the pilots’ moms’ souls in them or something, I guess. I would have liked to see what they could have done if they hadn’t run out of money. I was waiting for a big “jaw drop” moment, like when PMMM did the same thing to the magical girl genre 15 years later, but it just never came.

Did nobody in this production think to ask questions like: “Maybe these characters would benefit from an explicit foil?”, “why does this twink show up and give Shinji a boner, then ask him to kill him?”, or, “Should we maybe look into what the personality traits of these children are implying? Because this degree of depersonalization typically indicates ongoing child sexual abuse.” I feel like nobody ever told Anno the words, “No.” at any point during production.