Panoramic view (from a viewing platform on the mountain ridge). Shinji, Misato, and the car in the foreground.
Shinji (pre.):“It's such a desolate city.”
Mr. Tines: (085~098) Look — the sun actually sets! One of my pet niggles is about sunsets where the sun doesn't set (see episode #24). The sun crosses its own width in 2 minutes, so with the zoom in on the disk like we have, we should see noticeable movement, either horizontally or vertically, over the duration of the typical Eva sunset scene.
Hexon.Arq: This shot makes me wonder about the expanse of Tokyo-3. In the gun-hauling scene, there seemed to be a much more active landscape than what we see here, something resembling Las Vegas. What buildings are apparent (those that do not retract) seem to be very tiny, almost house-sized; the city seems almost completely flat. It makes me wonder about how big the ceiling buildings must be for their scale to dwarf what structures we saw previously. It could just be my lack of aggressive observation, but the city seems to change appearance a lot: towering where convenient and desolate likewise.
Reichu: The "tiny buildings" we see in this panoramic shot are apparently, at their tallest, actually Eva-sized -- i.e., 40 to 200 meters in height. Since the Evas are deployed after the "ceiling city" is retracted underground, the battles, and the various artifices existing solely for Eva use (elevators, armament buildings, etc.), exist on the city outskirts. As we'll see more clearly next episode, most of the non-retracting buildings are about waist-high, with a few slightly taller than an Eva. See more.
Hexon.Arq: Those must be some pretty damn big streets.
Reichu: Interesting that you should mention the streets. A production drawing of Tokyo-3 designates one of the streets going through the middle of the city as a "six-lane highway", which might explain why they are so big.
