Bill Murray wears a Vostok Amphibia

Bill Murray's Steve Zissou sits at his lab bench in a red knit cap and a faded blue Team Zissou uniform, an orca looping silently on the monitor behind him, a single red apple parked on the table beside his right hand. On that wrist is a small steel dive watch with a dark dial. It is a Vostok Amphibia, reference 420526, and Wes Anderson did not put it there by accident.

The Amphibia is a Soviet diver that Vostok began building at its Chistopol factory in 1967. It was engineering around scarcity. Lacking the materials to machine a thick screw-down case, Vostok designed one that seals tighter the deeper it goes: a flexible acrylic crystal and a bayonet caseback that water pressure presses harder against its gasket as you descend, rated to roughly 200 meters. It cost almost nothing then and still sells for under a hundred pounds now, which is the whole joke. The real Jacques Cousteau, the man Zissou is failing to be, wore the watches that defined dive watch history, the Rolex Submariner and the Blancpain Fifty Fathoms. Anderson handed his washed-up oceanographer a cheap Russian one instead, a watch that matches the leaking ship and the dried-up funding and the crew that has not been paid.

The choice rhymes across the whole picture. Several members of Team Zissou wear Vostoks, while Owen Wilson's Ned Plimpton, the moneyed half-brother who arrives from outside the family, wears a Rolex GMT-Master. The reference 420526 has since been nicknamed the Amphibia "Zissou" by collectors, and Vostok eventually issued a commemorative caseback stamped with Murray's face. There is a quiet optimism in the casting. The Amphibia's trick is that it holds up best under the most pressure, which is exactly the thing Steve Zissou keeps performing even as everything around him springs another leak.