Jonah Hill wears a Richard Mille RM 052

The replica is the point. Jonah Hill wears what appears to be a Richard Mille RM 052 Skull on his wrist as Jason Orlean in Adam McKay's Don't Look Up (2021), but it is almost certainly a knockoff, which makes it the single most on-the-nose costume detail in a film made entirely of on-the-nose details. Orlean is the idiot son of the President of the United States, a failson with a podcast and no discernible skills beyond proximity to power. Of course his watch is fake.

The real RM 052 Skull retails for roughly half a million dollars. Richard Mille designed the skull-shaped movement bridge as a technical showpiece in 2012, suspending the tourbillon inside a grade 5 titanium case with sapphire crystal front and back. It is an absurd object even by haute horlogerie standards, the kind of watch that exists to announce that the wearer has more money than restraint. Putting a replica on Jason Orlean collapses the distance between the character and the culture McKay is satirizing. Orlean doesn't need a real one because the performance of wealth is the whole game. Nobody in his orbit would check.

McKay's satire runs broad, sometimes to a fault, but the costume department earned their pay with this one. The skull motif on a character this vacuous, in a film about humanity's refusal to take its own extinction seriously, does its own work without a single line of dialogue.