Final finished all the movies, yeah waiting 12 years was not worth it. Did not one think to ask WTF is going on? The last two needs major rewrites for any sort of coherence. The Anime was much better.
View attachment 305772
I actually think 3.0+1.0 is a masterpiece.
The movie ties together the original ending with the Rebirth ending. It solidifies Gendo's mindset (ex: a big question was how does Gendo see Rei? Yes, she's a clone of Gendo's wife/clone of Shinji's mother, but the 3.0+1.0 movie clarifies finally that Gendo see's Rei as her own self, as a daughter. Not as a science-project to recreate his wife). Rei's development after all is about her clone-self: whose soul is she? Where does she fit in all of this? She may be the most fit mentally, but she's still got existential issues, and the movie finalizes where she plays in the entire plot... in a way that the other two endings failed to do.
A lot of the fan-theory was that Rei saw her self (and Gendo saw Rei), as Yui (the wife of Gendo / mother of Shinji). The movie explicitly goes
against the fan-theories and gives us a far more plausible explanation. Contradicting the long-running fan-theories of the relationship of characters takes a lot of guts, and this "Rei is the daughter of Gendo / Sister of Shinji" thing is a very pleasant way to tie up the series.
The anime-ending was pretty good (and I like it a lot more than Rebirth). But 3.0+1.0 really adds to it.
------------
From Shinji's perspective, it actually gives a plausible escape for Shinji's depression. It takes multiple weeks, and characters who have grown up (since Shinji is time-locked due to the 3rd impact). Grown-up Toji and the new character Mari Makinami give Shinji a path to escape the oppression of the Hedgehog's paradox.
EDIT: The fight scenes were kind of bad though. But I guess they were better than the original ending.
