Evangelion: 2.0 You Can (Not) Advance

ヱヴァンゲリヲン新劇場版:破 (Evangelion Movie 2: Ha)

8.5(2)

OtakuDen

8.3(368,085)

MAL Score

Ranked #335

Popularity #423

Drama
Sci-Fi
Suspense
Mecha
Psychological

Episodes: 1
Duration: 1 hr 52 min
Aired: Jun 27, 2009
Status: Finished Airing

Synopsis

As the Angel threat intensifies, humanity’s defenses are stretched to the breaking point, with NERV leading the fight. Shinji Ikari and Rei Ayanami are joined by two new Evangelion pilots: the hot-blooded Asuka Langley Shikinami and the enigmatic Mari Illustrious Makinami.

Piloting heavily armed Evangelion units built to confront their monstrous enemies, the four teenagers are thrown into increasingly desperate battles to protect the people they care about and hold off a looming catastrophe. Yet as unsettling truths surface, the conflict begins to feel less like a war against Angels—and more like a reckoning with what humans are willing to do to survive.

Otaku Consensus

Evangelion: 2.0 You Can (Not) Advance is the Rebuild installment where Khara’s project stops feeling like preservation and starts feeling like a decisive reinterpretation, with Hideaki Anno’s oversight and the Tsurumaki/Masayuki direction turning familiar Evangelion material into faster, more emotionally exposed blockbuster cinema. Critics single out its sharper pacing, the expansion of the original series’ “alone together” psychology, and Rei’s recontextualized arc as major strengths. Its most persistent criticism is that its power still depends heavily on the viewer’s relationship to the original Evangelion, making some of its impact feel inherited rather than fully self-contained.

Why You Should Watch

Watch Evangelion: 2.0 if you want mecha spectacle that treats every launch, impact, and tactical decision as psychological pressure rather than simple escalation. It scratches the same itch as the darker end of Neon Genesis Evangelion, but with a denser theatrical pace, more overt kaiju scale, and a Rebuild-specific sense that the text is arguing with its own legacy. Viewers who like the military machinery of real-robot anime but also want super-robot excess, denpa unease, and meta adaptation choices will get the most out of it. It is especially rewarding if you want a sequel-remake hybrid that does not merely modernize animation, but tests whether Evangelion’s old wounds behave differently when the characters are nudged toward connection instead of isolation.

Key Characters

S
Shinji Ikari
Shinji functions as the film’s emotional stress test, with fans often reading his Rebuild portrayal as more openly reactive than the TV version without losing the character’s defining anxiety.
R
Rei Ayanami
Rei receives one of the film’s most discussed reinterpretations, especially in how her quiet social gestures sharpen Evangelion’s long-running concern with distance, empathy, and human contact.
A
Asuka Langley Shikinami
Asuka’s Rebuild-specific surname is more than cosmetic for many viewers, signaling a version of the character designed to sit differently beside Shinji and Rei than her original-series counterpart.
M
Mari Illustrious Makinami
Mari stands out because she enters Evangelion as a deliberately destabilizing new variable, giving longtime fans a character whose purpose cannot be mapped cleanly onto the 1995 series.

What Makes It Stand Out

1
The film is produced by Khara, not as a routine recap but as part of the Rebuild project led by original creator Hideaki Anno as chief director, with Kazuya Tsurumaki and Masayuki credited as directors.
2
Reviewers frequently identify 2.0 as the branching point of Rebuild, the film where the project’s divergence from a straightforward remake becomes clear rather than merely hinted at.
3
Its tonal mix is unusually quantifiable in fan tagging: AniList marks it as both Kaiju and Super Robot at 92%, Denpa at 90%, Military at 78%, Meta at 75%, and Real Robot at 70%, capturing its hybrid identity more precisely than a basic mecha label.
4
A widely noted aquarium sequence gives Rei a metaphorical role in articulating the film’s view of humanity, turning a quieter interlude into one of the clearest statements of Rebuild’s revised emotional agenda.
5
Its reception has remained strong across major anime databases, with an 8.29 MAL score from 368,085 votes, a #335 MAL rank, #423 popularity placement, an AniList score of 81/100, and 2,687 AniList favourites.

Fun Facts & Trivia

Fun fact 1: Evangelion: 2.0 You Can (Not) Advance aired in Japan on June 27, 2009 as a single theatrical installment, listed in database terms as one finished episode.
Fun fact 2: Hideaki Anno holds two key credits on the film: original creator and chief director, reflecting how Rebuild is both a continuation of his authorship and a revision of his earlier work.
Fun fact 3: The directing structure is unusually layered: Kazuya Tsurumaki and Masayuki are credited as directors, Ikki Todoroki as assistant chief director, and Katsuichi Nakayama and Daizen Komatsuda as assistant directors.
Fun fact 4: Design Works credits include Yasuhiro Yoshiura, Hidenori Matsubara, and Seiji Kio, underscoring how the film’s production identity is spread across specialized visual contributors rather than a single mecha-design headline.
Fun fact 5: Critical writing around the film often frames it as essential to understanding Rebuild’s intentions, with reviews describing it as a pivotal installment that evolves Evangelion’s original themes instead of simply repeating them.