Why is this so highly praised?

Rating: 2/10 (13 December 2018)

So i just came back from watching this. And for once I wanted to see a DC movie and feel like it was worth my time. Here are my thoughts:
-OK visuals..
-The undersea world looked like it had some potential. It would be interesting to see more about daily Atlantian lifes or how the other, seemingly very different kingdoms, function. Sadly James Wan did not want to elaborate on that.
that pretty much sums up all the good points of this movie. Now to the bad ones:
-no character development or any attempt to make the hero resonate with the audience which is very weird, aquaman being an origin movie
-very poor acting (especially Momoa.. My god.. ) and unexisting chemistry between actors which is almost funny at some points. Regarding the acting Aquaman is supposed to go from super-confident in the beginning to somewhat scared/sceptical by the middle of the movie by what's at stake. Movie tells you that's what's happening at least. Momoa never portrayed that in any way. Same dude throughout the movie saying his lines.
-Music selection. Aquaman is portrayed intentionally or unintenionally being somewhat goofy/witty/smartass. And the music background playing in every one of his scenes sounds like you are watching The Dark Knight. Only darker.. But goofy.. Makes sense.. No..? Ok moving on..
-Jokes were between cringy and plain bad. Some one-liners especially from Momoa made me shiver in discomfort. To me it felt like James Wan saw Thor: Ragnarok and tried the same approach but much much more poorly executed
-no real story development (or even story). Felt like a videogame where your hero goes from place A to place B fights some dude that noone cares about (Im looking at you Manta), gains his XP and then onto the next scene. Seriously if Manta was not part of the movie it would have made literally no difference. Pretty much like the Joker in Suicide Squad. DC was criticized about it then but here we go again....
-Again regarding the story. There is literally nothing original here that you haven't already seen in every other pop-corn movie before. If this is not your first movie then you can easily predict the lines, the story, the 'plot twists'... Pretty much everything..
-And since we are at the story.. Why was that submarine bombarding Atlantis? As far as we are told noone even believed in Atlantis aside from some people who were considered 'weird' or 'conspiracy theorists' by the general public. So could the government know about Atlantis all along? And its plan was to send a lone submarine some thousand meters undersea for what purpose? Or was it an inside job? Shouldnt we be told or hinted at least? I mean that incident, again from what we are told, initiated the war underseas that would lead to the invasion of the Atlantians against the people of the surface. Either I was half asleep when they explained/implied this or the movie was laughably lazy with this
I could go on but I mostly wanted to share my rough feelings on this especially after seeing how highly this movie is praised at this point. If this was released in the early 00s where the superhero genre was still discovering itself then it would have been fine. But at this point its definitely not.
Honestly if you care only for the visuals go watch it. If you expect anything more do not waste your time.
Personally I think I am officially done with the DCU