Liam Neeson wears a Casio Wave Ceptor

Bill Marks is a Federal Air Marshal who has been drinking on the job for years, and Non-Stop opens with him boarding a transatlantic flight he expects to be routine. Liam Neeson plays him for director Jaume Collet-Serra as tired and compromised, a man already drinking before the cabin doors close. About an hour into the flight his phone buzzes with a message from someone on board: move a hundred and fifty million dollars to an offshore account, or a passenger dies every twenty minutes.

So the film turns into a race against a clock, and the clock is partly the one on Marks's wrist. It is a Casio Wave Ceptor, reference WV58DA-1AV, a sub-hundred-dollar analog-digital on a steel bracelet. The Wave Ceptor name refers to how it keeps time: the watch syncs to the radio signals broadcast by national atomic clocks, resetting itself so it never drifts. Among its digital functions is a countdown timer, and in the film Marks uses the watch to track the killer's twenty-minute deadlines, the cheap Casio getting prominent close-ups while he does.

Most movie watches are costume, chosen to say something about a character and then forgotten. This one is a working instrument the plot actually runs on. Around Marks the cabin fills with bigger names in smaller parts. Julianne Moore takes the next seat, and Lupita Nyong'o plays a flight attendant in one of her first roles, Non-Stop opening two days before she won the Oscar for 12 Years a Slave.