Name: EVANGELION: DEATH (TRUE)²
Genre: Animation, Science Fiction, Action, Drama
Released: 1998-03-07T00:00:00+00:00
Duration: 69 min
Cast: Megumi Ogata, Kotono Mitsuishi, Megumi Hayashibara, Yuko Miyamura, Akira Ishida

Few films argue with themselves the way EVANGELION: DEATH (TRUE)² does. It is a feature assembled almost entirely from a television series, its scenes lifted from more than twenty episodes and shuffled out of sequence, then cut again, and again, until the title itself grew a footnote insisting that this version, at last, was the real one. The result is one of the strangest objects in the history of anime, a movie built from the memory of a show, edited into a form its own makers kept refusing to call finished.

That restlessness is the point. Where most compilation films flatten a series into a highlight reel, this one treats the reassembly as an act of interpretation, braiding four teenage pilots and the adults who command them into a single crescendo. The children climb into towering humanoid weapons to fight things called Angels; the grown-ups who strap them in turn out to be, if anything, more broken than the kids. Stripped of the weekly rhythm, the story stops being a monster-of-the-week serial and becomes a study of people who cannot be repaired, only redeployed.

A montage on this scale lives or dies on its voices, and the returning Japanese cast is what holds the collage together. Megumi Ogata’s Shinji Ikari carries the flinching center of the thing; Kotono Mitsuishi’s Misato Katsuragi supplies the false brightness that keeps cracking; Megumi Hayashibara and Yuko Miyamura, as Rei Ayanami and Asuka Langley Soryu, give the film the two poles the whole series orbits. Across fragments pulled from wildly different points in the run, those performances are the connective tissue, the argument that this is one continuous breakdown rather than a clip show.

Hideaki Anno has always been a director who cannot leave his own work alone, and this is the earliest evidence of it. Co-directed with Masayuki and Kazuya Tsurumaki, the picture belongs to a lineage of filmmakers who keep reopening finished work and calling the new version the true one, the same impulse that produced multiple cuts of Blade Runner and a longer, stranger pass at Apocalypse Now. Anno would later spend years doing it at feature scale, remaking the entire franchise from scratch. The compulsion starts here, with a creator revising a text in public, in front of an audience that had already memorized the first draft.

The compilation film is an old and slightly disreputable form, usually a contractual stopgap or a way to sell television back to the people who already watched it. What keeps this one upright is that it never pretends the seams aren’t there. The out-of-order editing foregrounds the act of assembly, so the viewer stays half-aware of watching a machine sort its own memories. It plays closer to a remix than a recap, and it asks a genuinely modern question: once a story has been told, retold and revised, which version earns the right to be canonical?

Seen from a distance, the picture sits at an odd crossroads in how the medium tells its stories. Television anime had long fed its hits back into cinemas as recap features, yet few of them dared to treat the recap as a new work with its own logic. This one does, and in doing so it anticipates the whole modern economy of the remaster, the extended edition and the streaming re-cut, where the definitive version is simply whatever the author decides to release last. It is a small film carrying an outsized argument about who owns a story after it has been told.

None of which makes it a substitute for the series it plunders. A newcomer walking in cold will meet a beautiful, punishing blur, because the emotional debts the montage collects were run up over two dozen episodes it cannot fully repay in a little over an hour. The (True)² branding sells revision as completion, yet the program stops short of an ending on purpose. On its first night it screens alongside Rebirth, a fragment that breaks off mid-thought, and the actual conclusion arrives only as a separate ticket the following evening. What returns to theaters is a bridge that was always designed to leave you stranded.

A still from EVANGELION DEATH TRUE 2 directed by Hideaki Anno, two Evangelion units facing off (1998) — Two Evangelion units clash in EVANGELION: DEATH (TRUE)² (1998)

The credited principals carry straight over from the series that spawned it: Ogata, Mitsuishi, Hayashibara and Miyamura, with Akira Ishida as the unnervingly gentle Kaworu Nagisa and Fumihiko Tachiki as the glacial Gendo Ikari. The animation came out of Gainax and Production I.G, with Tatsunoko Production and Toei attached, and the finished cut runs a compact sixty-nine minutes. GKIDS is handling the North American return under its Evangelion 30th Movie Fest banner, part of a wider wave of anniversary revivals dragging the franchise back onto the big screen.

The Death (True)² & Rebirth program plays United States theaters on July 21, 2026, with Canadian screenings the following day, July 22, at participating AMC and Cinemark locations; The End of Evangelion follows as its own event that second night. The cut first reached Japanese screens in 1998. Three decades on, a film that could never quite decide it was finished gets one more pass in front of an audience, which feels less like a compromise than the only honest way to show it.