Anyone looking to chart the course of superhero movies over the past decade would run into an early bump when they hit 2009’s Watchmen, which exists outside of the Marvel/D.C./X-Men triptych that currently defines the genre.

What do you do with Watchmen? It lives in a category of its own. It was neither critically beloved nor critically maligned; neither a massive hit nor an embarrassing flop; and based on what’s probably the single most acclaimed graphic novel of all time, but centered on a handful of original superheroes that are unknown to general audiences.

As it turns out, time has been kind to Watchmen. The movie’s missteps and excesses are still there, but they’re a lot less glaring, and its outsized ambitions seem a lot more admirable. And now that you can stream it via Amazon Prime—in three different versions!—it’s an ideal time to revisit it.

Watchmen is set in a parallel-universe 1985, in which costumed crime-fighters briefly existed before the U.S. government banned them. As the film begins, one of the ex-superheroes is brutally murdered, and a morally dubious former ally decides he’s going to solve the crime. The story quickly balloons into a twisty conspiracy thriller, introducing a series of former superheroes and dipping into global politics in a way that… well, let’s just say it feels uncomfortably resonant in 2018.

I don’t want to overpraise this movie. Several very good actors, including Malin Akerman and Matthew Goode, are simply miscast in the roles they’ve been given. Director Zack Snyder’s distinctive visual style—which has since been employed, to rapidly diminishing effect, in DCEU movies like Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice—becomes headache-inducingly monotonous around the third action sequence. And the less said about the now-infamous sex scene set to Leonard Cohen’s "Hallelujah," the better.

But Watchmen also contains moments of startling power. Even Watchmen haters usually acknowledge the effectiveness of the opening montage, which tweaks a series of iconic moments in American history to the tune of "The Times They Are a-Changin’." But there are plenty of other highlights scattered throughout. The sequence that focuses on the death and rebirth of Dr. Manhattan is the best origin story I’ve ever seen in a superhero movie. It’s visually stunning, perfectly edited, and put against a killer Philip Glass cut. A similar sequence, which explains the origin of fan-favorite character Rorschach, is similarly effective. And with apologies to hardcore Watchmen fans, I prefer the movie’s streamlined ending to the bonkers fake-alien subplot from the original comic.

I can see why this stuff didn’t quite work for mainstream audiences in 2009. Watchmen probably came too soon. The movie hit theaters less than a year after The Dark Knight and Iron Man, which quickly emerged as the standard-bearers for the modern superhero blockbuster. Like M. Night Shyamalan’s Unbreakable, Watchmen offered a deconstruction of a cinematic genre that hadn’t even been fully constructed yet.

Of course, that wouldn’t be a problem in 2018, in which five of the year’s 10 highest-grossing movies to date are superhero movies. With movies as varied in style and tone as Avengers: Infinity War, Deadpool 2, and The Incredibles 2 arriving within months of each other, audiences are newly armed with the knowledge that makes Watchmen’s riff on the superhero genre really pop.

So which of the three versions currently streaming on Amazon Prime should you watch? The Theatrical Cut is what it sounds like. The superior Director’s Cut adds 24 minutes of footage, including an entire subplot elaborating on the fate of retired superhero Hollis Mason. And the Ultimate Cut, which comes in at a whopping three hours and 35 minutes, intercuts the film with Tales of the Black Freighter—an animated story-within-a-story about the survivor of a shipwreck, which offers some teasing thematic parallels to the main narrative.

I don’t think the Ultimate Cut is the best version of Watchmen, but it’s the one I enjoy watching the most, because it’s absolutely nuts that it even exists. Watchmen hails from a time when a Hollywood studio allowed Zack Snyder to oversee a standalone animated movie about a pirate ship from hell—and then cut it into his R-rated, already pretty weird superhero movie.

That’s crazy. And it serves as reminder that the majority of today’s superhero movies exist in the same little box. Even "subversive" movies like the Deadpool series are structurally identical to the now-entrenched template for a superhero movie. Watchmen feels like it came from a different era—a time when Hollywood was still figuring out this superhero thing, which allowed this dark, weird movie to slip past the Hollywood gatekeepers and into movie theaters around the world.