Mel Gibson wears a Rolex GMT-Master

Air America (1990) drops Mel Gibson into the cockpit of a CIA cargo plane over Laos. He plays Gene Ryack, a veteran pilot for the real covert airline that flew supply runs, and the occasional drug run, across Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War, in a film director Roger Spottiswoode pitches somewhere between war picture and action comedy. On Ryack's wrist, in shot after shot, is a Rolex GMT-Master with the red and blue Pepsi bezel.

It is one of the rare film watches doing exactly the job it was built for. Rolex introduced the GMT-Master in the mid-1950s for Pan Am pilots, adding a fourth hand and a 24-hour bezel so a crew could read a second time zone at a glance. The red and blue coloring, later nicknamed Pepsi, came from aviation rather than the soft drink, echoing the livery of the airline cockpits the watch was made for. Ryack flies routes across borders for a living, exactly the use the watch was designed for.

There is a small irony in the casting of the watch. Air America takes place in 1969, but its clothes, haircuts, and hardware all look more like 1990, the year it was shot. The GMT-Master is one of the few things in frame that genuinely belongs to the period, since the line had already been in production for more than a decade by then. It reads clearest in a cockpit scene, where Ryack talks into a headset and the steel Oyster bracelet and Pepsi bezel sit plainly below his cuff.