Oh for Christ sake. (To your friend, of course, not you.) It's people in giant robot suits fighting giant monsters. That's not an idea that's exclusive to Evangelion.
I argued both these points. He's just kind of a dumbass about things like this.I thought the fact the monsters are called Kaiju made it pretty obvious this is a sort of love letter to the Japanese monster movies of days past. Even the fact the monsters seem to come in many different shapes and sizes (one even had wings in that new trailer) really makes me imagine those crazy battle royales between monsters and robots that defined franchises like Godzilla or Ultraman.