Lance Henriksen wears a Seiko Giugiaro Chronograph

Bishop's best-known moment in Aliens is the knife trick, the old five-finger fillet run between splayed fingers on a mess table at blurring speed, the android performing it without a flicker. Look at his wrist while he does it. A Seiko rides there, a chunky black quartz chronograph with its start and stop buttons set on a panel bolted to the side of the case.

It is a Seiko Giugiaro, drawn by Giorgetto Giugiaro, the Italian who shaped the DeLorean and the BMW M1 before he turned to watches. James Cameron put Giugiaro Seikos on much of the Aliens cast. The famous one is Ripley's, the 7A28-7000. Bishop's is its sibling, the 7A28-6000, a different case from the same family, running the same 7A28 movement, which was the first quartz chronograph Seiko ever made with real hands and dials instead of a digital readout. Seiko built around forty versions of it, and two of them ended up in this film.

There is a quiet joke in an android wearing a watch at all, a machine with a clock inside it strapping a second one to its arm, and the film is wise enough never to point at it. What the watch does instead is sit on the steadiest wrist in the picture, the one calm enough to run a knife between splayed fingers at full speed, which is exactly the arm you would put a precise, over-built chronograph on.