Kurt Russell wears an unidentified watch

Partway through Poseidon, Robert Ramsey works his way down a dark passage of the wreck with a flashlight in his fist, and the beam glances off the watch on that wrist: a round, gold-tone case on a dark leather strap, the cuff above it smeared with blood. Kurt Russell plays Ramsey, a former New York City mayor and onetime firefighter, aboard the luxury liner Poseidon for a New Year's Eve voyage with his daughter Jennifer (Emmy Rossum). A rogue wave capsizes the ship in the North Atlantic as the passengers ring in the new year, and most of what follows is a father climbing up through the inverted hull to reach her.

The watch is a dress watch: gold case, leather band, a pale dial the flashlight burns out before the camera can read a name off it. It goes with the white evening shirt Ramsey still has on, both dressed for a New Year's party rather than for a bloodied climb through a flooding ship. No brand is legible in the frame, and none has been published, so the make stays unknown. What it keeps is plain time, the one thing the trapped passengers are running out of as the water climbs.

Poseidon is Wolfgang Petersen's 2006 film, the third made from Paul Gallico's 1969 novel after the 1972 original. Warner Bros. spent about 160 million dollars on it, much of that on the water tanks and computer effects that roll the ship over, and that work earned the film its only Academy Award nomination, for visual effects. It lost the award to Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest, and it cost Warner Bros. roughly 70 million dollars. Ramsey does not make it off the ship: he drowns in a flooded control room, reversing a propeller so the others can climb free, and the gold watch on his wrist goes down with him.