Logan Marshall-Green wears an Oris Williams F1 Team Skeleton Engine Date

The Prometheus reaches the moon LV-223 in the year 2093, and the first thing Charlie Holloway does when the air reads breathable is take off his helmet. Everyone tells him not to. He does it anyway. Logan Marshall-Green plays the archaeologist as a thrill seeker in a scientist's job, the man who, in his own description, leaps before he looks. It helps the mission about as often as it hurts it. On his wrist is the strangest possible watch for the job.

It is an Oris Williams F1 Team Skeleton Engine Date, and the name is a mouthful for one simple, radical idea: take everything off the dial. Oris built the watch under its long sponsorship of the Williams Formula One team, and the conceit is an engine on display. The movement, the automatic Oris caliber 733, sits exposed behind the sapphire. So does the date mechanism, which almost no watch lets you see. The date ring runs naked around the dial and a small red arrow at six o'clock points to the date. It is a watch with its hood up.

Think about how odd that is in this particular movie. The Prometheus is flown by an android and briefed by a holographic recording of the company's founder. The future, in Ridley Scott's hands, is a place where nothing mechanical is left for you to see. And the one crew member sprinting around an alien tomb with his helmet off, the one who wants to touch everything with his bare hands, wears the only watch on the ship that refuses to hide how it works.

The Oris has since been discontinued, which is its own kind of fitting. Holloway does not make it home. Neither, in the end, does almost anyone. The watch that wore its workings on the outside belonged to the man who did the same, and it is the more memorable for being the one thing in that sterile white ship you could actually watch tick.