Asa Butterfield wears a Nixon Digital Watch

Battle School dresses its recruits in matching flight suits, all clean lines and shoulder patches, the uniform of an army that trains children for a war they have not yet seen. Asa Butterfield wears that kit as Andrew "Ender" Wiggin in Ender's Game (2013), Gavin Hood's film of Orson Scott Card's novel. Ender is a "Third," a third child in a world that permits two, singled out by Colonel Graff (Harrison Ford) and sent up to an orbiting station to drill for combat in a zero-gravity room. The enemy is the Formics, an insectoid species that humans call Buggers, behind two earlier invasions that nearly ended Earth.

Ender's watch is a real one, and a plain one. Propstore, which sold the screen-used piece, describes a black Nixon digital on a ribbed rubber strap with a steel buckle, stainless steel under the black, the Nixon name on the face and again on the caseback. By the prop house's own account it appears on Ender at school and at home, where Graff recruits him. Nothing about it is science fiction. It is an off-the-shelf sport watch standing in for the gear of a regimented school.

That fits a film built on things that are not what Ender is told they are. The desks are tablets, the Battle Room is a game, and the final exercise, the one in which he wipes out the Formic homeworld, is handed to him as a simulation until it turns out to be the real war. The watch is the one thing on him that is exactly what it looks like. Off the wrist of the boy who unknowingly ends a species, it went to Propstore and sold on April 4, 2015, untested, the most ordinary object in a film that closes on the death of a world.