Not sure if I posted this yet, but...
This movie has hope.
It brought back a lot of the old spongebob humor, which means something that was funny without having to be morbid or just cringe-worthy. Spongebob actually is criticizing Patrick's actions again instead of being laughing and oblivious to everything around him and just like laughing all the time. Patrick is still dumb, but at least he's the funny dumb humor rather than the "I'm completely dumb and I just annoy for fun". Squidward doesn't seem as grouchy as he usually is, and is actually helping out with everything, which we haven't seen in awhile.
I mean, there are some really good new spongebob episodes that I think shouldn't be overlooked, but sadly most of the new spongebob is just terrible. However, the new movie at least looks so much better than the new spongebob.
Most of the criticism about this movie is the 2-D to "Modern CGI" transformation and the new character designs outside of the water. At least they still look like them for the most part, and at least it's not all "Modern CGI" for them.