They did a live-action Yamato movie about five years ago. Not that good; they compressed the entire mission into about two hours. The visuals were really good tho, very similar to the Battlestar Galactica reboot.
Then they rebooted the Yamato anime series with a 26-episode run. This is available a few places online, free, but with subtitles. It is truly excellent from both a visuals and a plot/character development standpoint. While it still follows the original year-long mission to Iscandar plot, with many of the same points and devices, it’s very much it’s own creature and much superior to the original Yamato and the edited/Americanized Starblazers.
I saw the movie a year or so ago and thought it wasn’t bad (I agree that the visuals were pretty nice). Not excellent, but not horrible, either. I’ll keep an eye out for the new versions of the series.