We’ve come a long way from Batman Begins. Christopher Nolan has evolved from that-Memento-guy-who-kind-of-did-an-okay-job-with-the-Insomnia-remake to one of the biggest directors in the world. It’s hard to remember now, after The Dark Knight, but Batman Begins wasn’t a revelation. It was “merely” an excellent superhero movie with a brilliant, jam-packed first half and a fairly pedestrian second half involving a comic-book-ish microwave transmitter device on a train hurtling to the heart of Gotham City. The villain wanted to wipe the city off the map in a plan with way too many moving parts to be compelling. After the realistic first half of Begins, the stakes suddenly felt too high and too unbelievable, with dense little information dumps dropped into the script along the way.

It wasn’t really until Batman Begins’ sequel, The Dark Knight, that Nolan truly found his feet. Heath Ledger’s frightening, engrossing portrayal of The Joker pushed the whole thing into once-in-a-lifetime territory. Without all the exposition and origin business in the way, Nolan employed the full range of his moviemaking skills to give us a primal battle that was more than just good versus evil—it was about our continual efforts to fight back chaos. It was the best superhero movie ever made, and it only improves on repeat viewings. So it’s surprising that so much of the third and final movie in Nolan’s trilogy, The Dark Knight Rises, relies on Batman Begins to make sense. Rather than fleeing from the sillier elements of the first movie, as Nolan seemed to do in The Dark Knight, he embraces them and makes them central to the plot of the trilogy’s conclusion.

It begins with a promising enough premise that diverges from every movie Batman we’ve seen before: Eight years after the events in The Dark Knight, Batman has disappeared, and his alter ego, Bruce Wayne, has become a diminished, Howard Hughes–like reclusive figure. Gotham is safe, and complacent. I’m not going to spoil anything here about the plot, but you probably know most of the elements from the trailers and commercials: A muscular madman named Bane (Tom Hardy, sounding like Darth Vader’s pervy little brother) is up to no good, and a cat burglar known in the comics as Catwoman (Anne Hathaway, with a dead-inside voice and very little presence) is caught in the middle.

And it’s enjoyable, for sure....(Keep reading.)