Joseph Gordon-Levitt Is Right: The Dark Knight Rises Is "The Perfect Ending"

It's always interesting to hear what an actor has to say about a major movie long after any contractual obligations have passed; while they go through the release having to toe the studio line, saying the right things in junkets and being all smiles on the red carpet, when a few years have gone by they're free to be brutally honest. Often we'll get belated apologies or exasperated criticisms, but every now and then you get one that's just lovely.

During the press tour for Snowden (a movie he's no doubt praising blindly), Joseph Gordon-Levitt shot down any suggestion that he'd ever play the new Batman in a fourth Dark Knight movie, citing the finality of The Dark Knight Rises:

"I know we're all used to the sort of Marvel movies, which are just kind of endless series. They don't really have a beginning, middle, and end. But I think Nolan very much thought of that movie as a conclusion, and there's a theme that runs through all three of those movies that begins in the first movie, runs through the second movie and it concludes in that moment where he says that Batman is more than a man, Batman is a symbol. And so to have another man other than Bruce Wayne kind of becoming Batman at the end of that trilogy, I think that's the perfect ending to that story."

Now he has hit on exactly why I love The Dark Knight Rises; it takes the themes that were raised in both Batman Begins and The Dark Knight and tied them together into an incredibly satisfying conclusion. The film often gets a lot of hate from some areas of the fanbase, with complaints ranging from sloppy narrative to the lack of a 'roided up Bane, but when you take it as the firm conclusion that's taken inspiration for Dickens as much as Kane, then it's damn perfect.

This strong thematic grounding is, incidentally, what the DCEU has been missing so far; it's a hodgepodge of influences with no filter on the content. Although I don't want this to turn into another one of those articles.

Also note the shots fired at Marvel. He's not disparaging of the ever-expanding universe, merely citing how it doesn't obey standard narrative convention, something that I think has played a big part in that franchise's massive success in the wake of such tight trilogies the decade previously.

What do you think? Is JGL being overly kind or is The Dark Knight Rises really a perfect end point? Have your say down in the comments.