I am a bit of a fan of Hideaki Anno - all of his prior films and works have been sophisticated. He created evagelion, a raw film about a schoolgirl falling into prostitution, absurd short film about getting a seat on a train, and a great reinterpretation of godzilla. So I was very much looking forward to this film.
It started strongly with interesting character design, great presense from the first enemy, and anime style fight scenes and physics. But then it went down hill where it just became a formulaic series of fighting enemies.
There was no character developement, little back story, and situations and enemies would just occur for some mild action that had no build up or little justification.
It ended up being a cliche movie of kill a series of enemies and then have a bigger final boss battle. And ofcourse the woman dies, and they make out like she was kamen rider's soulmate eventhough the entire movie they hardly spoke snd showed no interest in each other. Her character was very inconsistent where she bounced from being cold and stoic to being precious and complaining.
Overall as a viewer you are not engaged, as you know little about the characters and the backstory, and arent aware of the significance of anything. Which is bizarre because Anno has been so brillant at delivering on all of these elements in his past work.
It ended up being just a series of boss battles with interesting costumes and chorography at times.. but that was about it.
.. At least Shinya Tsukamoto had an acting role in this and will likely use the paycheck to fund another of his projects..
It started strongly with interesting character design, great presense from the first enemy, and anime style fight scenes and physics. But then it went down hill where it just became a formulaic series of fighting enemies.
There was no character developement, little back story, and situations and enemies would just occur for some mild action that had no build up or little justification.
It ended up being a cliche movie of kill a series of enemies and then have a bigger final boss battle. And ofcourse the woman dies, and they make out like she was kamen rider's soulmate eventhough the entire movie they hardly spoke snd showed no interest in each other. Her character was very inconsistent where she bounced from being cold and stoic to being precious and complaining.
Overall as a viewer you are not engaged, as you know little about the characters and the backstory, and arent aware of the significance of anything. Which is bizarre because Anno has been so brillant at delivering on all of these elements in his past work.
It ended up being just a series of boss battles with interesting costumes and chorography at times.. but that was about it.
.. At least Shinya Tsukamoto had an acting role in this and will likely use the paycheck to fund another of his projects..