Live Countdown
Want to see a live countdown to this event? Use the main Sci-Fi Countdown app, select Neon Genesis Evangelion from the Story dropdown, and choose this event from the Event dropdown.
Historical Record
Evangelion 3.0: You Can (Not) Redo takes place roughly fourteen years after the crisis at the end of 2.0, which places it around 2029 in the supplied chronology. That jump is one of the most aggressive structural moves in the whole franchise. Instead of walking the audience step by step through the aftermath of Near Third Impact, the film drops directly into a world that has already been remade by it. Cities are gone or transformed, the political order has hardened into new alignments, and the Evangelion program is no longer merely a defensive apparatus but the center of a fractured post catastrophe struggle.
The most important fact about this world is that Shinji wakes into it without context. He becomes a living time displacement inside his own continuity. The others have lived through fourteen years of consequences, grief, blame, and strategic adaptation. He has not. This gives the film its distinctive historical texture. The audience learns the new order through a protagonist who is just as lost as they are. WILLE, the anti NERV organisation operating from the AAA Wunder, exists in open opposition to the forces still gathered around Gendo and the remnants of NERV. The former pilot group is scattered, altered, or aligned in unfamiliar ways. Memory itself becomes unevenly distributed history.
The setting demonstrates the scale of the rupture. The world is scarred by the aftermath of the previous impact event, and the practical aims of survival are now inseparable from attempts to prevent further apocalyptic escalation. The Evangelions remain central, but they are no longer symbols of emergency hope in the way they were during the early 2015 battles. They are now bound up with dread, contamination, blame, and strategic paralysis. This is why 3.0 feels so different from everything before it. It is not a continuation of the campaign year. It is a future built from that year's disastrous excess.
In timeline terms, 3.0 matters because it defines the late Rebuild world before the final resolution arrives. It establishes the consequences that 2.0 only hinted at and turns them into the main reality of the setting. The film's disorienting style is part of its historical method. Rather than explaining the transition cleanly, it forces the viewer to experience the broken continuity directly. Around 2029, then, the Rebuild story reaches its bleak middle future: a world after partial apocalypse, still armed, still divided, and still in danger of being pushed into something worse.
Key details
Date: 2029, approximate
Location: Post impact Earth, including WILLE and NERV operational zones
Source: Evangelion: 3.0 You Can (Not) Redo, 2012
Significance: Rebuild 3.0 reveals the fourteen year aftermath of Near Third Impact and the open conflict between WILLE and NERV.
Related events
FAQ
Q: Why is there such a huge time jump in 3.0?
Because the Rebuild story wants the audience to feel the scale of the damage rather than watch it unfold conventionally. The fourteen year gap makes the aftermath itself part of the mystery and the shock.
Q: Is 3.0 still mainly about fighting Angels?
Not in the same way as the early films. The world has moved into a more fractured stage where the consequences of earlier impacts and the conflict between WILLE and NERV dominate the story.