Natalie Portman wears an Omega Speedmaster

Noah Hawley's Lucy in the Sky (2019) takes the bones of the Lisa Nowak case, the NASA astronaut whose life came apart after a mission, and turns it into a study of what space does to a person who comes home. Natalie Portman plays Lucy Cola, an astronaut who returns from orbit to find earthly life gone flat and small, and who slowly comes undone trying to get the feeling back.

On her wrist for almost the entire film is an Omega Speedmaster X-33, the quartz, titanium, analog-digital watch Omega built in 1998 as the working successor to the Moonwatch. Where the Moonwatch trades on Apollo nostalgia, the X-33 is a tool: Omega handed prototypes to astronauts and pilots to test in the field, and the finished watch went into service aboard Mir and the ISS, keeping mission-elapsed time and running countdowns and alarms beneath an LCD. Cola wears the original 1998 version, not the modern edition Omega calls the Skywalker, which is its own small irony given that Portman once played the mother of Luke Skywalker.

The detail that matters is that she barely takes it off. The X-33 is the watch an astronaut wears to keep mission time, and Cola keeps wearing it on Earth, where there is no mission left to time. Hawley even puts the old Moonwatch on her astronaut lover, played by Jon Hamm, so the two watches sit side by side: the Apollo legend on the man, and on the woman the working stopwatch she cannot bring herself to stop.