For this if nothing else, The Dark Knight Rises will endure as a milestone: I never thought there would be a better Catwoman than Julie Newmar, never, but Anne Hathaway owns the role after uttering a single “Ooops.” It’s an “Ooops” dripping in sexiness and insincerity, coming as it does after Christian Bale’s Bruce Wayne interrupts her in the middle of a heist and before she dons her leather or rubber or vinyl or whatever-it-is catsuit. The “Ooops” and its Jean Harlow naughty-girl reading come early in the film and the rest of Hathaway’s performance seems to flow from it. She’s flip, she’s funny, and she looks great astride the bat cycle thingee. She kicks credible ass, and she doesn’t overdo the cat business. She’s just right. She’s also the one bit of effervescence in a film that’s otherwise so turgid it would be unendurable—if it weren’t also brilliantly made. The Dark Knight Rises is as exhausting as it is entertaining.

As with a lot of comic book movies, between the sun-eclipsing hype and wanna-see hysteria, and the onslaught of the film itself, this is a work that defies thought or opinion or anything short of obedience—it’s half movie, half incoming asteroid.

Will Ferrell is my favorite comic performer because of his absolute, 100 percent commitment to his characters. Unlike Seth Rogan, say, or Jack Black, he never winks at the audience. That’s not a criticism; winking is fine. But I admire Ferrell for playing even the silliest scenes—especially the silliest scenes—with the ferocious intensity of Al Pacino truffle-hunting an Oscar. Christopher Nolan, the director and co-writer of The Dark Knight Rises, as well as the two previous films in his “Dark Knight Trilogy,” is the Will Ferrell of comic-book filmmaking. (Those quotation marks are a protest against the use of the word trilogy to lend pop culture unneeded portent.) Nolan takes even the most ludicrous material and invests it with so much belief, inflates it with such fierce imagination and intelligence, that he sucks you in and makes you believe too, scattering skepticism, disengagement, and critical thought like the puniest of foes. The fact that he has a handle on narrative and knows how to shoot and cut an action scene helps too.

Those are James Cameron’s talents as well, but in my book Nolan wins—I know: it’s not a competition, and I’d wager the two men admire each other’s films—because he’s drawn to material far nuttier than even Cameron’s. He’s Bulgakov to Cameron’s Dostoyevsky, or Lady Gaga to Cameron’s Katy Perry. I doubt he’ll ever surpass his 2010 masterpiece Inception, which was maybe the nuttiest studio film ever released, but The Dark Knight Rises comes close in its fusion of audacity, convolution, and Wagnerian bloat. At one breathless moment, while Gotham City is facing annihilation, Bruce Wayne ends up in a literal pit of a prison in some unnamed Middle-Eastern or South Asian country (I think) where the raggedy inmates chant like extras from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. Wayne’s back is broken, or close to it, the walls of the pit are unscalable, and all our hero can do is lie there and listen to some wizened old man explain plot points. I found myself thinking, This is like one of those cliffhangers on the old Batman TV show, but so much bigger and darker and better, yet still just as silly. And then I just gave myself fully to the rest of the film—the portion I hadn’t already surrendered to Anne Hathaway.

Here’s another way to look at blockbusters. Most of them just pummel you in your seat, Michael Bay’s films being the foremost example. Cameron’s and Nolan’s pictures take you somewhere exotic or fantastic and then pummel you; they’re like David Lean movies on Ritalin, or probably meth. By comparison, Steven Spielberg, who pretty much invented modern pop action-movies 40 years ago, is a restrained classicist.

To my taste, you have to approach comic books’ adolescent fantasies with Nolan’s level of commitment, either that or camp it up—you want Christian Bale or you want Adam West. (Tim Burton’s Batman movies with Michael Keaton should have been fun, and they looked great and had a nice esprit, but Burton doesn’t really know how to tell a story.) Most comic book movies err in trying to split the difference, with breezy performances like Robert Downey Jr.’s in the Ironman movies and The Avengers, or Toby Maguire’s in the original Spider-Mans, and soggy, earnest scripts that sop up too much pseudo-profundity in an effort to please the fan boys who take this stuff seriously.

As for Bane, the new film’s chief villain? I’m not entirely sold. He’s scary and relentless, and his facemask is engagingly creepy, a production design flourish paying homage to Darth Vader, Hannibal Lecter, and Jason Voorhees. But Bane never quite comes to life. To some extent that’s due to everyone’s Heath Ledger hangover, but I think there’s also a creative choice that gets in the way of Tom Hardy’s performance. His voice is processed Vader style, but to such a boogeymannish extent—it becomes a thundering if musical wheeze—that it becomes divorced from Hardy’s physical presence; it also occupies a plane distinct from the rest of the film’s soundscape, floating on top of the mix like a public service announcement.

One more observation: I like that Nolan’s Batman movies spice up the usual adolescent fantasies with civic and political paranoia. New York has been destroyed countless times onscreen since 9/11, but never before with such angst-inducing gusto as Nolan does here. In 2008, a lot of conservatives made hay out of the fact that The Dark Knight’s story of extra-legal, vigilante justice seemed to support the Bush administration’s more outré anti-terrorist policies. In the new one, Bane co-opts the rhetoric of the Occupy Wall Street movement, Gotham City’s job creators are cruelly victimized by collectivist thugs, and, as you know, the city’s savior is a multi-millionaire who hasn’t worked in years. A grateful Gotham says nothing about his tax returns.