Bill Paxton wears a Breitling Navitimer

Twister (1996) treats tornadoes the way most films treat monsters. Jan de Bont shot the storms as things that hunt. Bill Paxton plays Bill Harding, a meteorologist who left field work for a television weather desk and gets pulled back by his nearly-ex-wife Jo (Helen Hunt) for one more run at flying a sensor array into a funnel. Michael Crichton wrote the screenplay with Anne-Marie Martin and kept the science straight; Cary Elwes is the corporate-funded rival, Philip Seymour Hoffman the crew's wild man Dusty, and Jami Gertz the new fiancée with no idea what she has walked into.

Harding wears a Breitling Navitimer, the pilot's chronograph Willy Breitling launched in 1952 and that the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association adopted as its official watch, its circular slide-rule bezel built to work out fuel burn, airspeed, and distance without a separate computer. Leon Breitling had founded the firm in 1884 in Saint-Imier, but it was his grandson Willy who made it an aviation house. Harding's is a 1990s Navitimer, likely the reference A13023, with a navy-blue dial and three white sub-dials on an edge-stitched brown leather strap.