Matt Damon wears a Rolex Oyster

The people who agree to be shrunk in Downsizing (2017) have to decide first what to keep. Norwegian scientists have worked out how to miniaturize a human body to about five inches as a fix for overpopulation, and the pitch is simple: money goes a great deal further when you and everything you own are a fraction of full size. Matt Damon's Paul Safranek and his wife Audrey, an Omaha couple worn down by their ordinary lives, sign on. Part of going through with it is packing your most important belongings into a box labeled Keepsake. In the trailer the two of them are shown filling theirs, and one of the items going in is a stainless steel Rolex.

The watch was caught off that trailer rather than a clean frame, read as a vintage Rolex with a date from the crown at twelve o'clock and the small cyclops bubble over the three. That is the quiet end of the Rolex range, a piece that tells the time and the date and little else. Why a man would carry it into a five-inch life, out of the handful of things he is allowed to keep, the film never explains. Whoever first noticed it could only guess it meant something to him. The watch on Paul's own wrist elsewhere in the film is a different one anyway, dark-dialed on a black strap, and it is never shown long enough or close enough to identify.