Retake: Rebuild of Evengelion 2.0

(The joy of reading or watching a particular work is that when you go over it a second or third time, you begin to see alternate perspectives on how the story is playing out. You get to highlight new items of significance and draw new parallels. So while we have covered a great many works in the WLIA blog, a select few will have multiple articles dedicated to them.)

Title: "Rebuild of Evangelion: 2.0"
Series: Neon Genesis Evangelion
Original Topic: The March of Technology

As we mentioned in the original article, the charm of the Evangelion series is that it is over a decade strong, and as such, it has been subject to many aesthetic changes thanks to real world changes in technology. Now, that article was written over nine months ago. Since that time, many changes in the real world have already manifested which coincide with futuristic tech predicted by the film. It's a good thing too, because most of these predictions have to do with the global water supply.

Here's a bit of perspective: California, the US's most diverse agricultural and economic region, is currently facing its most severe drought in history. As of today, over 50% of the state is in the highest drought level, to the point that wasting water has become illegal. Needless to say, if we want to continue to sustain water needs, we need to bring in water from elsewhere. The best place would of course be the ocean, but that requires removing dissolved solids from ocean water first.

In the "Rebuild" films, one of the key background points was how the Second Impact occurred across all of Antarctica, tainting the water supply of the southern oceans before spreading to cover all interconnected bodies of water, turning it all a deep red. In order to reverse this, oil rigs were converted to giant water treatment facilities in order to clean the oceans year over year. Since the release of the 2.0 film, there have been numerous new water purification technologies in the works.

First on the list is Float Lab, an experimental container which floats on an open body of water. It takes that water into itself, purifies it and continues to hold it in storage. The design is going to be used to create +Pool, which is a series of large movable swimming pools for human use to be built on contaminated water. Then you have a special carbon-graphite material which uses solar energy to purify water. It's currently in a small-scale production, but larger systems could be made which utilize solar mirrors.

Of course, all of this technology costs money and will only be funded if the need for it is dire, the way it was in Rebuild. Some would say that time has already come, while others are holding out for just a while longer, squeezing the land of every last drop (no pun intended). The bottom line though is that if we do nothing, we will be subject to the same challenges and tribulations as those in the dystopic world of science fiction.

Evangelion Rebuild 2.0 - On the March of Technology

The second Rebuild of Evangelion movie begins to take the series in a different direction from the original, introducing a new character not seen in Neon Genesis, and changing some of the key plot events. Shinji Ikari and Rei Ayanami team up with Asuka Langley Soryu, a German Eva pilot with a slight perfectionist streak. As more Angels attempt to bring about the destruction of humanity, the characters find themselves thrown into greater challenges and traumas than they may be able to handle.

Evangelion Rebuild 1.0 - On Platform Architecture

In 2007, Hideaki Anno resurrected the Evangelion series with the first "Rebuild" movie. This was the first in a set of movies which is still in production as of 2013. The storyline begins in an identical fashion to the 1997 Neon Genesis series, but quickly moves into an alternate storyline.

In the year 2015, Shinji Ikari is your average schoolchild whose father runs a private military conglomerate known as NERV. When otherworldly monsters known as Angels storm the city of Tokyo-3, Shinji is tasked with operating the powerful Eva-01, and fighting the menaces as they come. In the first movie, he is assisted by fellow pilot Rei Ayanami, a mysterious and shy girl; and Misato Katsuragi, his temporary guardian and a colonel in the NERV military organization.

Some of you, at this time, might be wondering why it is called Tokyo-3. The first Tokyo was destroyed in the nuclear fallout that followed the Second Impact (one of the first sightings of the Angels, which claimed the lives of billions of humans in one fell swoop). Tokyo-2 is the series capital of Japan, though it was supposed to be a temporary location. Tokyo-3 was meant to be the final capital, but never received that designation formally.

Tokyo-3 is a technological marvel, relying heavily on a platform-based architecture that is easily swappable. During the day, the civilian buildings are locked underground, while weaponized 'dummy buildings' are locked into place above ground. At night, this layout inverts so the weaponized buildings are belowground, and the civilian buildings reach up into the starlit sky.

During Shinji's first battle with the Angel Ramiel, a platform emergency salvation system is activated. While Shinji is being bombarded by a particle beam cannon, Colonel Katsuragi orders that the explosive bolts which house the platform his Eva stands on be detonated. This causes the platform to vertically freefall, carrying Shinji with it and ultimately saving his life.

While it will be impossible for us to achieve such phenomenal architecture in the next two years, we are surprisingly already making progress. In 2010, the Ark Hotel in Changsha, China, was completed in six days. The process involved stacking pre-fabricated segments like you would LEGO bricks, and then securing them with heavy duty bolts. The finished product is capable of withstanding a 9.0 earthquake.

So yes, we could construct massive geometric tessellations on the landscape which are swappable in theory. However, the dilemma would come from the locking bolts built into the foundations of Tokyo-3 buildings in Evangelion. What kind of engineering would need to be used to allow these buildings to be unscrewed from their foundations, dropped several dozen meters, and replaced with identically proportioned blocks?