Is it worth to watch as a visual experience?

I don't quite understand why people wouldn't understand why it's disliked since it has plenty of problems and even the things that I think are good about it certainly won't click with everyone. You can take it as a plain style over substance thing and on that level you're going to have different opinions about it. There's not a lot of movies I feel so mixed about as this one.

I just thought it was amateur hour as far as film making goes.

That however is something I just can not get behind. There clearly is an idea to how it was made. This is clearly not just some guy pointing the camera at things happening.

Now I think some background is required both on how this movie came to be and how I experienced it (Because I watched these movies in th chronological order of release).
At the start there's probably Ang Lee's Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon. Which was already a movie more succesful with western audiences (made by a director who already had been working in "the west" so it sort of makes sense). It's also a movie I kinda love.
After having seen that movie where do you go?
A couple of years later director Zhang Yimou (also director of curse of the golden flower) picked up a bit in a similar trend with "Hero".
I think it needs pointing out that Zhang Yimou isn't just the-guy-who-made-the-wuxia-movies-who-isn't-Ang-Lee. Zhang Yimou had been pretty popular on western movie festivals where in China his movies were barely seen because they may been a bit too politically critical. I think a lot of those are well made but not exactly easy movies.
So, Hero. I like Hero, but it's incredibly overstyled. There's a couple of VERY clunky special effects but unlike Curse of the Golden Flower it does actually have convincing giant armies (not done with a computer so...). The structure of a story has a character telling a story and another character questioning it so you'll be getting different versions of the same story (all with their own primary colour (did I say the style is a bit much already?)) which is pretty interesting but does take away from the emotional engagement of it all.
Next up he made house of flying daggers. Which is a lot more toned down in style and I'd say just looks pretty gorgeous. Story is a whole lot more straight forward, which makes it easier to latch on to. So I'd say it's generally a better watch, maybe a bit less interesting to discuss. Still don't think it's as good as Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon.

Then we get to the main "course" of it all: Curse of the Golden Flower.
I just feel at this point Zhang Yimou didn't really want to make a similar movie as earlier but was somehow pushed to. Because I think it works well as a kind of court drama. I don't know how much of the movie is saved for me simply by Gong Li being a great actress here. What I like in the movie is basically the empress knowing mentally breaking and try to keep up appearances (while creating a plan) in this ridiculously "made" environment in which all the colours and shiny stuff are just overwhelming. So you'll have this overstylized "fake" environment with humanity trying to break through.
The problem then is that when *beep* actually hits the fan and there's fights, the fights look really fake as well, which is sort of ironic and I think really breaks the movie. My "favourite" instance of violence in the entire movie is just the emperor murdering his own youngest son. Because it's just someone getting brutally beaten up. Even though that happens off screen it feels a lot more real. If the action were more like Ran (1985) to just take a very high level example with all the shiny armour getting covered in blood and mud I might be calling the movie pretty masterful.

If you were wondering I like the movie for unintended reasons: yeah I've considered that myself as well. But I don't think so.

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