I really, really disliked season 1, felt totally unworthy of being an HBO show, especially given the pedigree involved. I'll give season 2 a shot based on that interview with Sorkin where he acknowledged his failings on the 1st season and said they were changing things around and improving for season 2. Still think using real-world news-stories was a mistake.

The acceptance and defence of this movie internet-wide is seriously making me angry. You're all the reason we can't have nice things. Well I'm not gonna settle, fuck that. If Michael Bay's name was on this instead of Del Toro, half of the fanboys eating this movie up right now would be criticizing the hell out of it and talking about how dumb it was. But when it's someone they like, it's just "dumb fun". Seriously, the only thing this has over a Transformers movie is that it's not racist, there's less inappropriate comedy, and it's a bit more coherent. Is this how far standards have fallen? That a movie not being racist, and just being badly-written and predictable instead of outright incoherent is considered a home-run?

The people we're supposed to root for in this are such complete non-entities, no personality, no quirks, not even really any interactions between them. I've seen people compare this with Independence Day, which itself isn't exactly Raiders of the Lost Ark, but at least it has Will Smith and Jeff Goldblum playing likable heroes who feel kind of like real people we want to root for. They have memorable lines and interactions. A tragic backstory is NOT a replacement for characterization, stop doing it hollywood!

And as for these mech-fights, having them punching monsters 90% of the time is the most boring approach you can take. How about mechs that are full of weaponry and constantly firing missles, guns, lasers, whatever? At least that would kind of be plausible, like an extrapolation of our current tanks. Not only is the choice stupid, but it heavily undermines the battles because you realize our heroes are complete idiots for running around punching these monsters when they have a one-hit kill sword sitting in their pocket the whole time. Lazy.

Arg, sorry for the rant, that got a bit out of hand. Now I know what Dave feels like about Iron Man 3.

Ya, can someone explain what the hell torchwood IS? How is it connected to Doctor Who? (without spoilers of course).

Except that by the looks of it every action sequence takes place at night in heavy rain, or underwater

Your skepticism is warranted, this has been the shittiest year of Summer movies in a long damn time. Fast and Furious 6 is still the best blockbuster of the year so far by a long shot, that's how bad things are.

For what it's worth, the reviews aren't necessarily "glowing" so far either. I've seen multiple people call it out for being shallow and dumb, better than Transformers certainly, but that's a really really low goddamn bar.

I'll see it, but I say keep them expectation in check

Ehhh, depends on how entertaining the bullshit ideology is.
I'd make the coolest scientology propoganda sci-fi war movie EVER

The whole "Dumb Summer Fun" is and always has been a shitty excuse for liking bad movies. When Jaws and Star Wars kicked off the concept of summer blockbusters, they weren't considered "good, but just dumb summer fun", they were just "good" movies period, that happened to get released during the summer.
And while there have been bad summer blockbusters released as far back as the 80s, you'll see that the closer you get to our present times, the less of the movies coming out are actually "good", and the more are sloppy, dumb, action movies that are given a pass as just being "dumb summer fun" (the hollywood saloon did a good podcast ep about the summer pass phenomenon around the time the 1st Transformers came out and got a 60% on RT: http://www.hollywoodsaloon.com/podcastEP33.html).

Now, of course its not fair to judge movies in drastically different genres on the same exact merits, Star Wars is great for different reasons than the Godfather is great. However, your comparison of Before Midnight is out of line because its a totally different genre. I don't expect Man of Steel to be good in the ways I expect Before Midnight to be good. However, I expect and judge it against other movies in its genre, superhero action movies, and by those standards, it's a big disappointment (especially given the promise of the trailer). For my money, Dark Knight, Dark Knight Rises (I know this point is controversial), Avengers, Blade 1 and 2, Iron Man 1 and 3, and Hellboy 2, are all vastly better movies.

Thanks for taking me to school guys, that makes a lot of sense

Glad DIF finally did this one, what an awesome, awesome movie. So many movies have cribbed from this play-book since, Ocean's Eleven being the obvious example. An even weirder one if you think about it is Inception, which is basically a sci-fi twist on the Sting.

Also, if you think Robert Shaw is scary in this, you really oughta give the "Taking of Pelham One Two Three" a watch. He basically plays Hans Greuber 10 years before Die Hard

I think the Collateral Damage complaint is a red herring anyway, it's not the reason the movie fails dramatically, more a symptom of larger issues. The problem is that Superman has almost no characterization in the movie, and indeed, there's almost no human characters to latch onto at all, its all either plot exposition or action sequences. If the rest of the movie worked, I don't think people would care much about the excessive destruction, but the fact that the movie feels dramatically empty and the action often lacks clear stakes (no damage to superman/zod) makes the destruction stand out as filler taking time away from missing character development, so people latch onto that as a complaint.