Michelle Rodriguez wears a Casio G-Shock

In Avatar, James Cameron's 2009 film set in 2154, the camera finds Trudy Chacon crouched by a wall of gear lockers, her flight helmet in her lap and a squat black watch on her wrist. Michelle Rodriguez plays her as a combat pilot for the RDA's private security force, the mercenary outfit guarding the company's unobtanium mine on Pandora. Trudy is the one who reaches a line she will not cross. She pulls her Samson off the run against the Na'vi, says she did not sign up for this, and throws in with Jake Sully's resistance. Rodriguez plays it as a professional's call, not a loss of nerve.

The watch is a Casio G-Shock, the cheap and near-indestructible resin watch real soldiers buy with their own money. Casio built the first one, the DW-5000C, in 1983 around a development target its engineers called the Triple 10: survive a ten-meter drop, hold to ten bar of water pressure, and run ten years on a single battery. The resin case shrugged off knocks that cracked a steel watch, and militaries took to it for exactly that reason. By Worn & Wound's account, the Casios on the wrists of Avatar's RDA troopers are G-Shocks, the same watch a soldier straps on today.

So the RDA fights its war in 2154 with AMP exosuits and Scorpion gunships, machines a century and a half past anything in service now, and its grunts still wear a resin Casio designed in 1983, one that still sells for under a hundred dollars. The hardware around the watch is pure invention. The watch is the one piece of gear in the frame a soldier could walk into a store and buy.