Angelina Jolie wears a Tissot T-Touch

About an hour into Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life, Lara is out in the field and needs a bearing. She does not reach for a compass. She taps the crystal of her watch, and the hands swing around to point north. Angelina Jolie plays Lara in Jan de Bont's 2003 sequel, chasing Pandora's Box from Santorini to Shanghai to East Africa, with Gerard Butler as the mercenary she hires and never fully trusts.

The watch is a Tissot T-Touch, and the compass trick is real. Tissot launched the T-Touch in 1999 as the first watch you operated by touching the glass. Tap different zones of the sapphire crystal and the analog hands reassign themselves to a compass, an altimeter, a thermometer, a chronograph, or an alarm, with electrodes mapped behind the crystal to each function. The case is light titanium, the dial is analog, and the whole idea was to fold a hiker's instrument kit into a watch that still looks like a watch. On a woman who rappels into tombs and runs across rooftops, a watch that turns into a compass without a single button is exactly the right gear. Lara's carries the green Tissot logo of the first generation, on a brown leather strap cut for the film.

The timing was not an accident. Tissot put the T-Touch on the most photographed action heroine of the moment, and it became one of the brand's signatures, the piece a generation of buyers walked in asking for by name.