Jackie Chan wears a Squale

In 1986, on a shoot that nearly killed him, Jackie Chan played Asian Hawk, a former rock star turned globe-trotting treasure hunter, in Armour of God for Golden Harvest. The production became one of the most dangerous of his early career: a fall from a tree during a jump fractured his skull and left him with a permanent plate in his head, an injury he barely survived. Through the stunts and the chases, Asian Hawk wears a large dual-module dive watch, a tool watch that pairs a timepiece with an integrated compass, the kind of two-story field instrument that reads as an adventurer's kit rather than jewelry. It suits the character, a man who needs to know the time and the way out, not the brand on his wrist.

The brand is the unsettled part. A Squale fits the period, since Squale made a vintage dive watch with an integrated compass, a dual-module quartz design of the 1970s and 1980s that predates the film. The Luminox Compass sometimes named for it cannot be right, for a simple reason: Luminox was not founded until 1989, three years after the cameras rolled. These rugged 1980s compass watches were rebranded across several small makers, which is how one watch on one wrist ends up carrying competing names decades later. The period-correct read is the Squale, and even that stays a possibility rather than a settled fact.