I liked The Dark Knight Rises. Yes, I said I liked it. I don't mean I didn't love it, I'm not heaping faint praise on the movie. This, to me, was a well made, thought provoking, well crafted and overall well made movie. Notice what I didn't say about the movie. I didn't call it a comic book movie. There's a reason for that.

The Nolan brothers have done for movies with caped and suited heroes what Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns comics did for comic books. They showed the possibility of the material. Through all three films you had heroes and villains who worked in the real world. The series of movies were the type of movies critics could like and give favorable reviews to without having to be comic book geeks. It's pretty ironic that the film versions of those comic book sources went to a mature route rather than what Marvel did with its properties.

Marvel still makes comic book movies. They make movies that comic book people love. Regular movie goers who might not be knowledgeable about particular motivations or history of characters, are asked to go along for the ride and let your inner kid love what is on the screen. They succeed very well with that. DC, for the most part, makes movies for the general audience and asks the comic book fan to trust them. We get a whole new origin and motivation for Bane and we are supposed to trust this is good. In the previous movie the Joker is presented in strange yet familiar vein. It's not the Joker of the comics in a pure sense, but this is the Joker we know. The trust paid off in that case because the general movie public knew the Joker from the TV show and the Burton movie. The Nolan Joker pushed those all aside in the mind of the general public and they loved it.

Bane and some of the other iconic characters placed in this film (I'm not going to name name's because they would spoil parts of the film) take the same route as the Joker. They are the same but molded for the film, to fit plot points in this film. While having one character deviate and working was fine, having multiple characters do the same trick means there is a possibility of failing on one or more. That happens in this case and it's the changes and the difficulty of following those changes that start to fray this movie at the edges.

My real concern about the fraying of this movie had to do with the sub-plot. Forget the Rush Limbaugh stupidity of Bane being representative of Bain from Mitt Romney's past. If the man had bothered to watch the movie before speaking, or even if he had bothered to look at early rumors of the film, he would have known this film was definitely about the Occupy movement, but done in a surprisingly comic book form. For a comic book like film that worked hard at keeping its characters grounded in reality, the subplot was incredibly out of reality. The whole Us vs. Them economic talk seemed to fit in anticipation of a larger movement that would have relevance by the time the film came out. Because the Occupy movement has fizzled, or at least is a lot less active now, the echoes of class warfare, of the storm coming, sounds like an empty threat. The people power revolution and the downfall of the rich seems very Hollywood. Now, if this were a drama without the cape, I think people would look at the subplot with a harsher eye. It would seem too pat, too (pardon the pun) comic-bookish. In this film, the holes and logic of the plot are somewhat forgiven because we are dealing with a guy in a cape.

As a side thought, DC is going to have some challenges with its comic book property to screen in the near future. They have hit a good stride with the serious comic book movie, but they saw the potential in what Marvel did and they want the same. As they showed with Green Lantern, that is easier said than done. With Marvel characters, they tend to be good guys in suits. What I mean is, to use a line said in The Dark Knight Rises, Marvel characters could be anyone, even you. Stark has money but he's a guy in a suit. Yes the Hulk was hit with gamma radiation and has a raging mean on, but at the end of the day he's a guy with bad coping mechanisms. DC characters are gods among men. The psychology of Superman, Wonder Woman and even Batman, and this was also mentioned in the movie, makes it they are the heroes all the time. With Batman, Bruce Wayne is the mask. He is Batman. Green Lantern isn't Hal as much as he is the ring slinger.

In the end, this movie was a fitting end to the series, keeping the tone it has maintained for the three films. There will be comic book fans who won't like the film, will detest the changes made, but this is a series of films not made for the fans, despite what many have thought. This was a series that made Batman for the general public, not the comic book fan.