Dominic Cooper wears a CWC Divers

Simon West's Stratton (2017), adapted from Duncan Falconer's novels, puts Dominic Cooper in the wetsuit of John Stratton, a Special Boat Service operative seconded to MI6. The film hoped to launch a franchise and didn't, but it does one thing exactly right. In the dive scene Stratton rises out of the water with a submachine gun up and a round black dive watch on his wrist, its rotating bezel and dark case reading unmistakably as a piece of military kit. The camera never gets close enough to read the dial, so the brand stays a matter of inference, but the inference is a sound one. The watch a real SBS operator would be wearing is a CWC. Cabot Watch Company has supplied the issued watches of the British forces since the 1970s, and its SBS Diver is the genuine special-forces piece: a Swiss quartz movement, 300 meters of water resistance, a knurled bezel made to be turned with cold wet gloves, a circled T on the dial marking its tritium lume, and fixed spring bars so the strap can never be torn loose underwater. Only about sixteen hundred were issued between 1988 and 2005 before production resumed in 2016. Putting that watch on a fictional SBS man is simply issuing him the correct kit, which makes a dive watch worn, for once, by someone actually diving feel less like product placement than like wardrobe doing its homework.