Jason Statham wears a CWC Military Issued

In 1980 the British Ministry of Defence had a problem with Rolex. The Submariners it had been issuing to Royal Navy Clearance Divers had become too expensive to keep buying, so the contract went instead to a small firm called Cabot Watch Company. CWC built a plain, hard, accurate diver to the Navy's specification, and for a few years that was the watch on the wrist of every man the Royal Navy sent underwater to defuse mines. The issued originals are scarce now. Most got used hard, then destroyed.

The watch Jason Statham wears in Meg 2: The Trench is a faithful reissue of that one. Ben Wheatley's 2023 sequel sends Statham's Jonas Taylor back down into the trench, against a fresh run of megalodons and an illegal deep-sea mining operation, and on his wrist is the CWC 1980 Royal Navy Diver, rebuilt to the old specification: sword hands, an unsigned crown, a one-way dive bezel, and lume printed with a small letter T, the way the originals marked their radioactive tritium, kept here purely for the look of the thing. Underneath the vintage dress is a modern Swiss automatic. CWC made six hundred of them.

There is something fitting about it that the movie never points out. Jonas Taylor is the kind of diver the real CWC was built for, a man who goes into the water where other people will not, except the thing waiting in his water is a prehistoric shark. The film does not explain the watch, or ask you to notice it. CWC noticed. The company put out a proud note when the film came out, their Navy diver, the genuine article, on the wrist of the most famous diver in the movies that summer.