Michael Peña wears an Urwerk UR-100

Ansel Argon spends Secret Headquarters (2022) chasing the Guard's alien power source, and in one of the frames on this record his hand is wrapped around it, the orb glowing through his fingers, a black watch on the wrist above. Michael Peña plays Argon, the villain of Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman's family superhero film, and Hodinkee, cataloguing the movie's unusually serious wristwear, identified the watch: an Urwerk UR-100 in black.

Urwerk is the Swiss independent founded by Felix Baumgartner and Martin Frei in 1997, and the UR-100, introduced in 2019, does not tell time the way anything else in this film does. A satellite carrying the hour sweeps across a minutes arc, vanishes, and re-emerges, while two further displays track distance instead of time: how far the Earth's surface has rotated at the equator, and how far the planet has moved along its orbit. A watch like that does not wander onto a set by accident. The directors are collectors, Joost turned up to Hodinkee's interview in a Royal Oak and lent his own vintage Heuer Autavia to Owen Wilson's hero, and Carlton DeWoody advised on the film's watches, a lineup that runs through a Maurice de Mauriac on Jesse Williams, a G-Shock, and a military-style Timex. The villain got the strangest machine in it.