Please don't spend money on this.

This is a tender, generous movie that likes its characters and presents them as real people, full of flaws and strengths.

I really wanted to like this movie. I feel terribly cynical trashing it, and that's why I'm giving it a middling 5. Actually, I'm giving it a 5 because there were some superb performances.

Each character in this movie — down to the smallest one — is an individual rather than a type, prone to spontaneous changes of mood and sometimes amusing outbursts of pettiness or ill humor.

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.

After the mass disappointment by a lot of the fans because of the last two episodes of the TV series NEON GENESIS EVANGELION, the creators decided to make an alternate ending known as NEON GENESIS EVANGELION: THE END OF EVANGELION, but before that, they made this film, which is only the build up to it. Split into two segments: the first segment is DEATH, which is just the whole TV series in a very condensed form, which only shows you all the events that have happened up until Shinji kills the final Angel. Then comes the REBIRTH segment, which is just the first 30-minutes of THE END OF EVANGELION.This movie is only worth watching if you've only seen the TV series with the last two episodes, since the intention of this movie is to make you forget about those two episodes and get you prepared for THE END OF EVANGELION. Other than that reason, it's not worth it.

The series itself is a true masterpiece, I spoiled it by watching "The End of Evagelion" first, do NOT do that. "Death & Rebirth" is a good re-cap if you've seen all but the last 2 eps. It's a bit back and fourth but overall it erases any confusion. Again, this series is beautiful, it's not just 'robots' fighting monsters it's SO much more...they are NOT robots... DO NOT pass this series up! It's an experience.

WARNING :::SPOILERS::: !!!!First half is a quick review of the series, minus the last two episodes, it also further explains what happened durning the second impact, kinda scary, also you learn more about misato, yui, and gendo... NERV then comes under attack by the very last angel, humans. SEELE ordered their special forces unit to take the 2 remaining Eva's by force. Almost everyone is killed, brutally i might add, and it bleeds into End of Evangelion, infact about all of Rebirth is repeated in Air, but then it continues....