Movie · 2021 · Animation, Action, Science Fiction, Drama · 2h 35m · NR · Japanese
Curator score: 9.5/10 (148.1K ratings)
Bye-bye, all of EVANGELION.
Overview
In the aftermath of the Fourth Impact, stranded without their Evangelions, Shinji, Asuka and Rei find refuge in one of the rare pockets of humanity that still exist on the ruined planet Earth. There, each lives a life far different from their days as an Evangelion pilot. However, the danger to the world is far from over. A new impact is looming on the horizon—one that will prove to be the true end of Evangelion.
Ratings
Curator score: 9.5/10
IMDb: 8.0/10
Letterboxd: 4.29/5
Rotten Tomatoes: 100%
Metacritic: 85
TMDB: 8.2/10
Director
Katsuichi Nakayama, Kazuya Tsurumaki, Mahiro Maeda, Hideaki Anno
A bold, emotionally cathartic sci-fi finale that turns franchise mythology into a story about grief, adulthood, and choosing life over repetition. It can be dense, self-referential, and wildly uneven in places, but the payoff is sincere, inventive, and unusually moving.
Best for
Viewers invested in the Evangelion saga
Fans of ambitious, meta sci-fi finales
People who like apocalyptic stories with emotional closure
Animation fans interested in formal experimentation
Viewers who appreciate catharsis after long-running character trauma
Skip if
You want a self-contained movie with little prior context
You dislike dense lore and symbolic storytelling
You prefer clean, straightforward plotting
You are looking for constant action over reflective character work
You have no patience for franchise endings and meta-textual payoff
Overview
Thrice Upon a Time is less a victory lap than a farewell letter, one that keeps asking what it means to outgrow the stories that formed you. It takes the series’ familiar machinery of apocalypse, trauma, and cosmic symbolism, then uses it to argue for something disarmingly human: acceptance, separation, and the courage to move on.
Worth noting
The film is at its strongest when it slows down and lets its characters breathe, especially in the post-apocalyptic domestic passages that feel like a hard-won pause after years of catastrophe. When it shifts back into spectacle, it does so with real visual imagination, mixing hand-drawn intensity, CGI, and conceptual abstraction in ways that feel purposeful rather than merely flashy.
Bottom line
It is also a deeply referential work, and that will be either thrilling or exhausting depending on your relationship to the franchise. For longtime viewers, the ending lands as a genuine emotional release; for everyone else, it may feel like being dropped into the middle of a private conversation. But even at its most opaque, it has a rare conviction: the insistence that endings can be kind.
Top Letterboxd reviews
Will Menaker (4★) · 3519 likes
Shinji grows up and *finally* gets pussy, thus ending the cycle of creation and apocalypse laid out in the dead sea scrolls. SEELE's scenario is broken by pulling a big titty gf. We love to see it.
Zach (4.5★) · 2616 likes
evangelion rebuilt and rephilosophized until it breaks and shatters and reiterates itself in an essential new form: understanding the pain of codependency and feeling, forging it into an exuberant lust for life where every human you've ever know has always been a part of you and will be forever. abandon escapism because the fantasy is in the beautiful world. all the pain and dejection and tragedy surmounts into a glistening climax of the will to live + forgiveness + passage + the most innovative use of cgi, franchiseism and postmodern storytelling in recent memory. it will probably end up a favorite movie. i love evangelion. さようなら
Wes (5★) · 1740 likes
“can you give me one last kiss?”
there really is no other way it could have ended. so much of what i love about storytelling, world building, character development etc. have been directly or indirectly influenced by Evangelion. on top of being a perfect conclusion, this works by itself by being an utterly stunning work of animation, with anno still experimenting with techniques that feels so fresh, it’s like watching a young director at the top of his game.
not the end, but the start of something new.
reibureibu (5★) · 1326 likes
Out of all the things I learned, struggled with, and went through in college, there's a specific moment that changed me the most. It was during my sophomore year when I had failed half my classes from the year before and given one more chance to make it work. I was, of course, depressed and didn't know it, or more accurately I refused to acknowledge it. Acknowledgement meant that there really was something wrong, and that would mean having to… more Out of all the things I learned, struggled with, and went through in college, there's a specific moment that changed me the most. It was during my sophomore year when I had failed half my classes from the year before and given one more chance to make it work. I was, of course, depressed and didn't know it, or more accurately I refused to acknowledge it. Acknowledgement meant that there really was something wrong, and that would mean having to… more
Drew Edelstein (1.5★) · 1227 likes
Bye bye, all of EVANGELION - and good riddance.
The Eva Rebuilds are pointless. They are the end product of the banal hyperfixation that all major media franchises will eventually suffer, the most extreme, self-aggrandizing, and utterly worthless endeavor that any filmmaker at Anno's caliber has ever undergone.
These movies are primarily stories about Evangelion itself, about the iconography of the series and about the meaning that is constructed from the narrative building blocks that have been created - but… more