I've been finally getting to Watchmen TV, I'm about midway through it and it's been making me want to revisit Watchmen to refresh. Haven't read the comic or seen the movie since 2009.
Also I'd only seen the theatrical cut. So I sat down last night and tonight and watched the 3.5 hour Watchmen - The Ultimate Cut which has the animated Tales of the Black Freighter mixed in.
In 2009 I liked Snyder's Watchmen. I respected that he didn't care about making it work as a well paced movie and just did a pretty authentic (outside the ending change) adaptation of the graphic novel. Watching it now, especially after now having seen the first four eps of HBO's Watchmen...Snyder's Watchmen doesn't hold up that well.
The story, thanks to the source material, is still good. Patrick Wilson is great (when has he ever been bad in a movie?), some of the slo-mo music video scenes are still neat like the opening. Some of the bits are still hilarious like the Hallelujah fuck scene. Visually it's alright, but comparing it to Snyder's Justice League Cut, he's definitely grown a lot style-wise as a director and his visual style is more a mixed bag in this.
What doesn't hold up so well is the acting and dialogue and line delivery is pretty stiff. Also the Ultimate Cut is way worse. The Tale of the Black Freighter doesn't really add much (plus it's ugly western animation style) and just makes the pace even worse, and the music is pretty eh, especially compared to Trent Reznor/Atticus Ross's score in the HBO show which I'm digging and feels like Reznor's NIN Ghosts album.
One thing that really stood out re-watching Watchmen now is that Snyder's Watchmen would've worked so much better as a TV series in the modern prestige TV era. It's structured in a way that would work well episodically with all the character's backstories which would be their own ep. The movie basically feels like a TV show scrunched into a 3 hour+ movie. It feels too long and still kinda rushed.
Anyhow, it was still enjoyable since I like the story, and it did refresh some points which is what I was looking for going into the back half of the HBO sequel, but if Watchmen wasn't a good movie in 2009, I think it's gotten even worse in the modern day.