Wow. Just wow. If you're wondering, I just finished watching the End of Evangelion movie for the second time, listening to the Audio Commentary version (by the way, Grondring, did you finish watching/listening to the Audio Commentary?). It's amazing how much effort was put into that movie. Anyway, I promise that I'll have a full length review of End of Eva up by Monday, but for now, you can enjoy the ramblings of an awe-struck, sleep-deprived lunatic.
Listenening to the Audio Commentary, you can't help but pick up a cynical undertone to the light-hearted jokes of the voice actors. If you didn't really understand the movie, it's not going to help but instead confuse you more by inundating you with even more biblical references through a very complete symbology lesson. Anyway, on to the more philosophical (read: stupid and random) part.
The End of Evangelion, in my mind, is remarkably memorable for its prolific, gruesome and horribly gratuitous use of blood, gore and violence. In fact, it's so bloody that I don't think Quentin Tarantino could compare to the sheer wrongness of it all (remember: Tarantino had a budget to the amount of ketchup he could use, but Anno could drop as many bottles of red ink on his cels as he wanted). As I was watching the movie, I started laughing as Asuka completely rips an Eva unit's torso off while its legs continue tottering for a few moments before collapsing. I believe this was caused by End of Eva's breaking of a certain mind barrier, after which violence becomes completely and absolutely hilarious. In the case of the people who laugh at small acts of violence (such as stuff on Comedy Central), they would be completely sobered by going past the same point. Thankfully, I am one of the former so I retained my sanity while watching this movie.
Anno ventures into the abstract many times in this movie, like he did in the final two episodes of the original series. In fact, I'm planning on going through those abstract episodes frame by frame at some point to catch all those easter eggs and other assorted
nougats of information. This abstractity, in my opinion, is good since it leaves many things unanswered and open to interpretation. It's also a bad thing for almost the same reasons.
To conclude the semi-formal mini-non-review, I'm going to add some memorable quotes from End of Eva to both tide people over until they watch it or to tide people over until they get my full review [hopefully] Monday.