Jodie Foster wears an unidentified watch

Robert Zemeckis adapted Carl Sagan's novel with Jodie Foster as Dr. Eleanor Arroway, a SETI radio astronomer who detects a signal from Vega containing blueprints for a transport machine. Foster researched the role by spending time with Jill Tarter, then head of the SETI Institute's Project Phoenix, and the performance has the focused intensity of someone who has spent years listening to static, waiting for a pattern.

The watch is unidentified — visible in a few scenes but never clearly enough to pin down make or model. For a character who works long shifts at remote radio telescope installations, the specific brand matters less than what a watch says about Arroway's relationship to time. She is a scientist measuring delays across light-years, and she wears something practical enough to forget about.