Kawawa Kadichi wears a Hamilton Jazzmaster

In a crew lineup in The Wandering Earth 2, five crew members stand shoulder to shoulder in gray flight suits while a screen beside them lists the shuttle's crew by number and name. Kawawa Kadichi, a Zambian actor, stands at the center as Herbert, a colleague of the astronaut Liu Peiqiang, with Wu Jing, who plays Peiqiang, beside him. Every arm hangs straight down and every hand sits below the frame, so there is no watch to read. Hamilton had put one there anyway.

The 2023 film is the prequel to China's space-disaster franchise, set in the years when a swelling sun forces humanity to start building the ten thousand engines that will one day shove the planet out of the solar system. Frant Gwo directs, working in the universe the novelist Liu Cixin built. Hamilton was the film's exclusive watch partner and supplied dozens of watches to dress the cast, so the watch on Herbert's wrist is a Hamilton even if the lineup, and the film, never give the dial a clear look.

Gwo commissioned one Hamilton himself. A brand ambassador for the company, he brought its designers an old Chinese idea, a round sky embracing a square earth, and they built it as a prop: a regulator dial, with hours, minutes and seconds each on their own track, set inside a 47mm square case cut from transparent acrylic and fitted with red lacquered hands. By Hamilton's own account the clear case is the point, since it shows the skin beneath it, the color of the earth, so the watch keeps a patch of the planet on the wrist in a film about hauling that planet away.

That prop appears in the movie, and Hamilton turned it into a watch you could buy: the Jazzmaster Regulator Automatic Limited Edition, reference H89905330 in black and H89905310 in white. It went on sale in mainland China in June 2023, each color held to 122 pieces, the number Hamilton chose for the film's release on January 22.