I'm now an hour in, and yes, I'd say it's that bad. Well, that's not quite right, actually.
It's amazingly poorly constructed. Characters are introduced abruptly, and then poorly characterized. I'm guessing that there's a ton of footage that was shot for this, but left on the cutting room floor, because I recall stuff from trailers that hasn't appeared and now has no reason to appear. But you can see where they tried different characterizations for this or that character, different ways to introduce them, and then just chucked it all to meet a running time.
The music is awful.
The various rock songs seem like they were included based on a group of, like, 10 fat old white dudes sitting around a boardroom. That or 10 teenagers who just said "Yeah, that'd be cool. Put that song in, like, there" and then just shoved a song into a scene. This film has made me appreciate how Guardians of the Galaxy worked with its music so much more, because that film is lightyears better handled than this one. The music in Guardians -- both volumes, I should note -- is organic both to the scenes and to the characters. It fits the mood, it fits the characters, it fits the moment. It calls attention to itself, but it blends with what's happening on screen. The music in SS, by contrast, feels...forced. It doesn't fit with the scene and kind of shows up abruptly out of nowhere, usually with some recognizable riff from the song, and it doesn't seem to really apply to the characters or the sequence. It's more just like "insert cool song here." And yeah, the songs on their own are cool, but they just don't...fit....in the scene. Moreover, they distract from the action. It's jarring, really. Like trying to listen to two different conversations at once.
In a way, that also seems to apply to the editing, at least with respect to narrative. The sequences all fit a very basic overall plot, but the individual scenes themselves...I dunno. It feels like there's stuff missing in some sequences, but at the same time, it feels like the film doesn't have time to breathe and explore what it's trying to do. The last time I experienced something like this was with Age of Ultron, but at least there the scenes felt like they flowed together better, even if it still felt like the story and characters had no time to really breathe. Here, the scenes themselves feel...I dunno...jumbled almost. Or at least like you can see where something was probably cut.
I'm really only watching like 20-30 min at a time with the film, but it just feels so...off...that now I'm just watching it almost out of curiosity to see how and why it doesn't work. I've seen bad movies. I've seen LOTS of bad movies. Hell, I saw Battlefield Earth in a theater (granted, it was a dollar theater and I watched a matinee with nobody but my friends and I in it, so it was basically MST3K for us). I've seen awful, unentertaining, big budget movies before. I watched Man of Steel and the first Transformers film. So, I've seen really dumb, really poorly made, really expensive films. But this one is different. It just feels so cobbled together, so "designed by committee." It feels rushed and obligatory in its design, although some of that may be my own knowledge of how this film came into being.
And the really sad thing is that not only is the concept itself really cool, there actually seems to be a decent movie buried deep underneath the film we got that just can't manage to claw its way out. There's an opportunity to tell a really neat story, with interesting characters, played by entertaining actors, and with terrific production values, but the sum of all of these parts is just...I dunno. It's bizarre really. A weird mix of what seems like amateurish errors, and well meaning but misapplied creative decisions by talented people, all rolled into one spectacularly ineffective story.