Evangelion: 3.0 You Can (Not) Redo

Evangelion: 3.0 You Can (Not) Redo is the third chapter of Rebuild of Evangelion, directed by Hideaki Anno alongside Kazuya Tsurumaki and Masayuki, reaching Japanese theaters on 17 November 2012. Early plans paired it with the finale as a double feature under the working title Evangelion: Final, but the two were split. Its Japanese title trades the kanji Kyū for the letter Q, echoing the announced subtitle Quickening. Where the earlier films reworked existing episodes, 3.0 is built from entirely new material, a shift the film itself winks at when Shinji's tape player advances to an unheard track. Shirō Sagisu composed the score with the London Studio Orchestra, and Hikaru Utada returned from hiatus to sing the theme Sakura Nagashi.

In Earth orbit, Asuka and Mari retrieve the sealed container holding Evangelion Unit-01, fighting off autonomous Nemesis units when the recovery goes loud. Shinji is pulled from within the Eva's core and wakes aboard the AAA Wunder, the flying flagship of WILLE, an organization Misato now commands with the sole aim of destroying NERV and every Evangelion. His reception is ice cold. A detonating collar called the DSS Choker is locked around his neck, Unit-01 has been gutted to power the ship, Asuka wears an eyepatch and has not aged thanks to the Curse of Eva, and fourteen years have passed since his last memory.

A Rei he does not recognize extracts him aboard the Mark.09 and delivers him to the skeletal remains of NERV headquarters. There Gendo assigns him to co-pilot the new Evangelion 13 with Kaworu Nagisa, who befriends the boy over piano duets before showing him the truth: the awakening of Unit-01 set off Near Third Impact, and the ruined red world outside is Shinji's doing. Fuyutsuki deepens the wound over a shogi board, revealing that Yui lives on inside Unit-01's core and that every Rei is a disposable clone of her. Kaworu transfers the choker to his own neck and proposes a fix, retrieving the two Spears from Lilith's corpse in Terminal Dogma to restore the world.

The plan is a trap. Too late, Kaworu sees that both weapons are Spears of Longinus, and Shinji, deaf to every warning, rips them free. Evangelion 13 awakens, throwing open the doors of Guf as Fourth Impact begins. Kaworu, revealing himself as the First Angel recast as the Thirteenth, lets the choker kill him to stall the cataclysm, and Mari ejects Shinji's entry plug to end it. As Gendo and a shattered WILLE both withdraw, Asuka hauls the catatonic Shinji across a crimson desert, the nameless Rei clone trailing behind.

Japanese response split down the middle, reflected in a Yahoo! Movies Japan score of just 3.12 stars of five, even as the box office soared: an opening weekend equivalent to roughly 14.1 million dollars beat both predecessors and topped the charts, on the way to more than 50 million dollars total. American critics were far colder than they had been toward the first two entries, with Rotten Tomatoes showing 20 percent from five reviews and Metacritic averaging 45.

The 3.33 home video edition landed in Japan on 24 April 2013, with Funimation's North American discs following in February 2016 after theatrical delays. A remastered version titled 3.333, announced in December 2020 with new retakes for IMAX screenings, came to disc in Blu-ray and 4K Ultra HD formats on 25 August 2021, shortly after the film joined Amazon's streaming catalog. Two animated prequels, EVANGELION: 3.0 (-120 min.) and EVANGELION: 3.0 (-46h), later filled in the hours before its story.