The ignored collateral damage isn't the main thing wrong with the movie, certainly. Although... using the destruction of a city as the backdrop for a romantic moment was a particularly odd choice. At least when Snyder did the exact same scene in Watchmen, the characters were appropriately horrified.
Anyway, I did finally see this movie the other day and although I didn't love it, I had a better time watching it than I did the galactic stupidity of Trek 2 or the lackluster paycheck-collecting of Iron Man 3.
Spoilers to follow, if anyone's still concerned about that.
It surely helped that I don't have any great fondness for Superman - so I wasn't bothered by anything they did "wrong". And I know the "right" story well enough to recognize what they changed, and I thought a lot of choices were interesting. Krypton was bizarrely fascinating, young Clark being unable to deal with his powers and seeming like a kid with mental illness was cool, and Pa Kent trying to help Clark and basically screwing him up even worse was certainly an interesting way to go.
And there was dumb science, but it was kept to a minumum - and really, a Superman movie kinda gets a pass on dumb science since there's no real-world explanation that justifies Superman's existence anyway. At least they didn't go into it much more than the classic "he gets his power from the Sun... hey look over there - ponies!"
But - once he put on the suit, the movie lost its way, spent too much time on side issues, and then concluded with a lot of expensive visual effects that didn't quite add up to a satisfying story.
Certainly the lowest point was "if we put his baby rocket near the big machine and something something, then the warp cores will oh look over there - ponies!" but at least the explanation scene was literally no longer than that sentence, and everyone in it looked appropriately embarrassed to be involved. You could especially see Richard Schiff thinking "I used to have my dialog written by Aaron Sorkin, now look at my life".
On the plus side - as near as I could tell - whatever they were trying to do with the baby rocket didn't actually succeed. Instead, the supporting characters heroically crashed their plane into the enemy's big tower in the middle of Metropolis - a daring real-world parallel that I'd like to think the filmmakers did absolutely on purpose as an ironic commentary but probably wasn't. But if it was, well wow - talk about taking 9/11 porn to its logical extreme. Balls of Steel, movie.
The thing about this reboot that I disagreed with most was the denouement - they held onto two things that have long outlived their usefulness in the Superman mythos, when they could have jettisoned them. One is the entire Clark Kent thing, which is just silly and really always has been. What does it bring to the story other than a lot of contrived situations? But okay, fine, it's such an ingrained part of the story that they held onto it. Fair enough.
But that brings us to the second anachronistic thing that they absolutely should have - and easily could have - modernized. Superman had a human alias so he could work at newspaper, and thus stay on top of events that need fixin'. Which made sense in the 1930's when television wasn't even a thing yet... but now? It's the 21st century - how much longer is "The Daily Planet" even going to stay in business?
So if they wanted to keep the Clark thing going, then what they could have done - and were all set up to do, but didn't - is have the Daily Planet leveled in the chaos, and at the end Clark and Lois go work for that other guy's internet news business. If you're going to reboot anything in the standard Superman story, reboot that.
EDIT: Unless they've got a plan for the sequel where The Daily Planet gets bought by the Metropolis equivalent of the Koch brothers and becomes a rightwing rag that spreads bullshit propaganda, so one of the villains in the movie is sorta the Daily Planet itself. That movie I might want to see. 
