Yeah, the whole timeline was messed up. Plus I wasn't ever sure how long afterwards the events happened from the big battle at the beginning. Or where Yamato came from in the first place, or how they got it outfitted with the new tech so quickly-seemed like they found the probe and then the next day they had the tech put in.
The acting was particularly bad, and then the camera work wasn't very good either, especially in space they didn't control it very well. In general the story just had issues. Like you said the robot thing popping out was cool, but I was wondering why it didn't do that after he landed, rather than waiting for people to start dying.