Emun Elliott wears an Oris Big Crown

Somebody has to actually fly the spaceship. In Prometheus, that job belongs to Chance, one of two co-pilots who sit under Captain Janek on the bridge of the USCSS Prometheus as it falls toward the moon LV-223. Emun Elliott plays him small and steady. When the ship lands, Chance and the other pilot, Ravel, bet a hundred credits on what they have flown two years to find: terraforming, says one, archaeology, says the other. Neither of them guesses monsters.

The watch on his wrist, if a single sharp-eyed watch-spotter has it right, is an Oris BC4 Flight Timer. I say if because the identification comes from one YouTube video and nowhere else, and the watch never quite faces the camera. It is still a telling choice, because it is the one watch on the ship built for the job its wearer actually does.

The BC4 Flight Timer packs a cockpit's worth of information onto one dial. The date sits at six o'clock. A second time zone with a day and night window sits at three. A prominent vertical crown at two o'clock turns an inner ring to set a third time zone, so a pilot can read home, destination, and somewhere in between at a glance. Oris has been building pilot's watches since the 1930s, when it gave its Big Crown an oversized winding knob a flyer could work while wearing gloves. The watches were never luxury objects. They were tools, priced for the people who needed them.

That is what makes the choice land, whoever made it. Chance is not the hero of Prometheus and does not try to be. He is the professional in the second chair, the one who, when the mission needs a pilot to fly a doomed ship into an alien craft and not come back, simply does it. The watch fits the man. It is busy, legible, unglamorous, and built to keep working in conditions that would stop something more expensive.