I would like to preface this review by saying that I absolutely love the original series of NGE. It has aged astonishingly well, and I think it's truly timeless. However, this film occupies a bit of a strange spot in the franchise. About an hour is recapping the series, and the final half-hour is a "sneak-peek" at the next film in the franchise, "End of Evangelion" (which I have not seen at the time of writing). This begs the question - if your intent is to follow the storyline of the franchise from start to finish, what point does this film play? You could watch the series and (I'm assuming) go straight to End of Evangelion and you wouldn't have missed anything. It's a bit like having a "previously on evangelion" segment, then a half-hour trailer for something you're probably going to watch afterwards anyway. I will admit, the recapping of the series did make me view some of the themes in a different light by juxtaposing scenes I didn't connect thematically before, so it's got that going for it. But it hasn't got a lot else I'd recommend it for other than that, or for revising the story so far if you haven't seen the series in a while. It's not bad. There's just not much reason for it existing.

I did not watch the original 26 episodes series but I watched in these days all Evangelion films, because of the high ratings: Death and Rebirth (a recompilation of the original series), The End (a rewriting of the End of the series, still considered one of the best Anime ever), and then the last three, 1 and 2 which reboot the series apparently without mayor changes, and 3 which goes in new territories. At first I will write about Evangelion in general, and then about this specific movie here. In all Evangelion the writer touched any possible demagogic stereotype and cliché on earth: father/son relationship, Oedipus complex, a bit of the typical Manga Style sexuality, cheap psychology, and a huge amount of very cheap esoterism with symbolisms of all kind. My opinion? A big omelet of everything, which finally means absolutely nothing. Wiki says that after the failure of his previous works (which he judged as childish) he wanted to make something "deeper". My impression is that he did not even try to BE deeper, rather just to SEEM deeper in order to impress the audience. And I am afraid that only the Naive could be impressed by such a confused mess.I can still see why this show had success: Evas are cool, fights too, and there is enough mix of drama, action, teenage nerd sexuality in the typical Japanese style, and some sort of epic. I suppose that if you are younger than me and without any knowledge of psychology or esoterism, and a bit nerd, you may enjoy this works pretty much more than I did.About this film: well, the first half is just a recompilation of episodes of the series, and the second part is a preview of the movie "End of Evangelion", so I would say: watch the first half. If you like it, you can watch directly End of Evangelion skipping the last part of this movie. I personally did so. The first half of this, then the End, then 1 and 2 (reboot of the Series), and then the horrible 3. Even if I am sure that watching the whole series would be a more complete experience, the vision of this recompilation and of the reboot 1 and 2 gave me enough not to feel I miss the series, and showed me that I may not like the series so much to dedicate to it more time.

When people say "skip this and go straight to End of Evangelion", they actually mean it.I love Evangelion but this movie is a waste of time and money. I bought it at HMV in the summer and bought it because I owned the series on DVD and TEoE.I was excited and I nearly shat myself because it said "107 Minutes", and I thought it was a movie, and it had an 18A rating (I'm from Canada, mind you). I bought it and rushed home with the DVD, taking it out of the silver slipcase and frantically taking it out of the package and putting it in the DVD player.What a waste of time!!!!! This is basically The series recapped in 45 minutes, followed by the first 20 minutes of TEoE. The minute I saw the opening scene from TEoE, I went "wait... are you sure I bought the right movie?". 20 minutes into that part, I just turned it off.Either way I find this negativity sad, because I really did like the series. I really did. I also saw The End of Evangelion and loved it to death, and I think if I had seen The End of Evangelion before this I would have liked it more, however that does NOT change a thing.I dunno about you, but right now I'm halfway into REALLY getting sick of the whole story. I mean, The creepy "Angels", the forgettable protagonist, the girl he's after and all that other stuff... aren't they beginning to get a little... erm... boring ? I mean, really, the only original part of the movie is in the "Rebirth" section, which can easily be found in TEoE.This is a waste of time and money, and the only reason to see is is for the "Director's Cut" stuff (But not like there's a whole lot, there's only 2 seconds of it in total).So this is basically my first Spoiler-free review, because really there's nothing at all to spoil. NO, this will NOT help if you haven't seen the show, and NO, the 45-minute flashback (snarl) will not help, either.Avoid like the plague! Or only see it if you have a burning desire to find out what happened to Asuka in the series.

The Evangelion series itself may well be a true masterpiece, a rare example of a popular work that transcends its commercial origins and enters the realm of great art. Unfortunately, this film fails to really do it justice as it consists primarily of material already seen in either the television series or the film End of Evangelion. Additionally, they redubbed many of the voices for the English version, and the new voices often fall quite short of the old ones (even if they didn't necessarily live up to the Japanese ones to begin with). Touji's lines, in particular, fall spectacularly flat. On the positive side, it does introduce some new and hard to get footage interspersed with some nice musical numbers from Bach and Pachelbel.