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| Title: Neon Genesis Evangelion: Death & Rebirth Run Time: 115 minutes List Price: $29.98 Company: Manga Entertainment Rating: 13+ |
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| 10-22-02 Fans of Evangelion have long and eagerly awaited the stateside release of the two Evangelion movies. Death & Rebirth is the first part of this two movie conclusion. Death & Rebirth is divided into two parts: Death and Rebirth (surprise). Death, the first part, is simply a rundown of the entire 26-episode series. It features clips for the series with a small amount of new animation sprinkled over. This was interesting, even after seeing the entire series; however, I wouldn't recommend that you watch this if you haven't seen the series. It won't be understandable. The second part, Rebirth, is the first half of the End of Evangelion movie. This Rebirth section WILL be available on the End of Eva DVD. Also, it isn't recommended that you go in and watch this if you haven't seen the series. It will make little sense. Simply watching Rebirth will not help you to understand what is going on. Rebirth takes place during the two final episodes of the series. Rather than seeing what goes on in their heads, we get to see what actually happens. SEELE attacks NERV after finding out Gendo's true plans. They want to use the Evangelions to initiate Third Impact. SEELE stages on all out attack, as I said, ruthlessly killing NERV personnel. This movie is much more violent than the series. We see SEELE murdering NERV personnel in a variety of bloody ways. In another disturbing scene near the beginning, Shinji visits Asuka in the hospital... A proceeds to masturbate over her comatose body. We don't actually see anything, (thankfully) but we do hear it and see the, ahem, after affect. The sound in this movie hasn't changed much from the rest of the series. Most of the music remains unchanged, and most of the voice "talent" has returned for this movie. The dub still isn't done all that great, although some of the voices do fine. I would have liked to have heard some cool new music, however. The animation also hasn't changed a whole lot since the series. Death looks exactly the same, with even the new scenes looking no different from the old. Rebirth features a slightly different look, although definitely very close to the same. It looks a bit brighter, I guess, and yet simpler in a way. It's nice. No complaints. There are plenty of extras on this disc, including a commentary and a feature that allows you to display definitions and other information about things as they appear in the movie. I haven't bothered to go through and check out these definitions, but I did listen to the commentary. It was interesting and offered some insight that I wouldn't have gotten or noticed otherwise. The menus aren't something I usually bother about, because in my opinion, that aren't all that important. However, I just thought I'd mention them. The menus are some of the coolest I've seen. Scenes and words from the movie scroll by, accompanied by Shinji's lovely violin. One slight annoyance was that it is a little difficult to make selections in the language menu due to the fact that it is on a slant. Overall, this is a good buy, however, it isn't recommended to anyone who isn't a big fan of Eva. If you haven't seen the series, you won't understand it. If you have, it simply offers a rundown of what you've already seen and half of a movie that you can buy on the End of Eva. There is nothing overly new here, especially if you buy End of Evangelion. Be warned. Score: 7 / 10 |