I’ve just been aggressively entertained by Christopher Nolan‘s The Dark Knight Rises. Or maybe it’s more accurate to say that I feel as if I’ve been beaten into submission — and a state of wide-eyed wonder and sheer audiovisual hangover — by a 165-minute film long on masterful direction of stunning set pieces. It’s also packed with variously heroic, scary and funny/sexy performances, and guided by a storyline that can, and will, be read as supporting multiple, conflicting political agendas.

Regarding that last point: Does the Gotham City anarchy in the film result from boiling-over class warfare driven by a leader who inflames the public with power-to-the-people rhetoric while secretly planning to benefit from the chaos? Or is it a result of long-festering institutional rot, lorded over and covered up by the wealthy and powerful, who would do anything to preserve their social status? (Just for the record, the screwy idea that the villain Bane is a stand-in for Romney, and thus the film is a Lefty attack on conservatism, makes no sense in light of the actual movie).

Nolan, easily one of the greatest living American filmmakers (see: The Dark Knight, Inception, and my favorite, Memento), opens the best superhero movie since the last Batman flick with an exhilarating mid-air raid, one of several sequences shot with IMAX cameras for maximum eye-popping impact. A team of baddies led by the villainous Bane (Tom Hardy, also in Inception), drops from a huge transport plane to wreak havoc on a smaller plane below.

Astonishingly enough, the sequence largely was executed for real, with stunt men, in the air over Scotland, rather than simply being a product of artful CGI. And, yes, the extra effort pays off, in droves, setting the galloping pace for the film and introducing Bane, who, with an obtrusive mask over his face, is a bit reminiscent of Hannibal Lecter, and speaks in a sort of electronic rasp. “I’m necessary evil,” he declares at one point.

The film brims with similarly impressive large-scale sequences, including a massive cops-versus-criminals rumble, the bombing of a stadium during a pro football game, the near-simultaneous explosions of buildings and bridges all across Gotham City, and several breakneck chases involving various Bat vehicles, including one with enormously fat tires and another able to fly in the sky AND stop on a dime.

And yet, The Dark Knight Rises isn’t at all overwhelmed by the hardware and explosions, or overly indebted to those trappings. Rather, it’s the human element that makes the film, co-written by Nolan and his brother Jonathan, far more compelling than your average comic-book movie; the others in the genre, in fact, come off as mere pretenders.

The director has elicited grade-A performances from his cast of returnees and newcomers, the former led by Christian Bale as an unusually vulnerable Bruce Wayne/Batman, retired from crime fighting and hiding from the public in the aftermath of the events of the last film. Not only did Wayne suffer the loss of his girlfriend, but the public believes that the late Harvey Dent (aka Two-Face) was a civic hero, murdered by “the Batman.” Commissioner Gordon (Gary Oldman), who knows the truth of the matter, feels as if he must continue to prop up that lie, and Wayne has neither the energy or the inclination to set the record straight. “There’s nothing out there for me,” Wayne tells longstanding family friend and butler Alfred (Michael Caine), who also seems powerless to help his old pal.

The first-timers to the trilogy help give the grand finale the kind of lift it needed, particularly in the wake of the superb The Dark Knight. Anne Hathaway, she of the big eyes and big teeth, makes a suitably slinky, sarcastic Catwoman, torn between her natural thieving, cheating tendencies and wanting to do the right thing. Two more Inception vets round out the cast — Marion Cotillard as a particularly pretty member of the Wayne Industries board, and the always reliable and often surprising Joseph Gordon-Levitt as a capable cop and key Wayne ally. As the sympathetic conscience of the crew, Gordon-Levitt is a real standout, and maybe the film’s MVP.

Third films in any given series typically amount to disappointing dilutions. Then there’s The Dark Knight Rises, which closes the Nolan-directed Caped Crusader trilogy at a fever pitch. It’s the opposite of a letdown, as a highly gifted director applies his considerable skills to an unusually textured tale of a familiar pop-culture hero. All that and the threat of nuclear destruction, too. Color me pleasantly shocked.