Leonardo DiCaprio wears a Cartier Tank

Dr. Randall Mindy spends the first act of Don't Look Up as an astronomy professor at Michigan State, the kind of man who needs a quarter of a Xanax to get through a morning in a White House waiting room. When he and his graduate student Kate Dibiasky find a comet headed for Earth, the warning tour takes him from the Oval Office to morning television, and television takes to him. In the early scenes he checks the time on a plain round watch with a dark dial. Fame brings new clothes, an affair with the talk show host played by Cate Blanchett, and a different watch: a small rectangular dress watch, silver toned, on a black strap. It is easiest to see about ninety minutes in, when Mindy melts down on a live broadcast with his hands in the air.

What that watch is remains an honest argument. A French watch publication identified it as a Cartier Tank in steel, and the shape fits: a small rectangle with a light dial, worn snug on the wrist. Plenty of viewers who paused the broadcast scene were unconvinced, and the most popular counter-theory holds that a Michigan academic would sooner wear the Seiko SUP880, a rectangular solar watch that enthusiasts call the Seiko Tank because it borrows Cartier's lines for a fraction of the price. The rebuttals are specific. The SUP880 comes in a gold tone and the watch on screen reads silver. The steel alternative, the SWR049, runs larger than what sits on Mindy's wrist. And several viewers studying the frame make out a dark dot on the crown where a Cartier carries its sapphire cabochon. No major watch publication has weighed in to settle it. What nobody disputes is when the watch arrives: with the fame, not before.