Nick Frost wears a MTM Black SEAL

Greg Mottola's Paul (2011) sends two British science-fiction nerds, Nick Frost and Simon Pegg, on a pilgrimage across the American Southwest, where they pick up a foul-mouthed alien voiced by Seth Rogen and spend the rest of the film fleeing federal agents in a rented RV. Frost plays Clive Gollings, an unpublished fantasy novelist whose closest brush with danger, before all this, was a tense moment at a convention panel. He is soft, sweet, and entirely out of his depth.

On his wrist is an MTM Black SEAL, which is a very serious watch for a very unserious man. MTM confirms the placement on its own site, and you can catch the chunky black case in the diner scenes. The Black SEAL is a titanium dive watch rated to a thousand meters, with a screw-down crown, a helium escape valve, a carbon fiber dial under sapphire, a Swiss quartz movement, and tritium tubes in the hands that glow on their own in the dark. It is built for combat divers locking out of submarines. Clive uses it to check whether the diner is still serving.

That gap is the joke, whether or not anyone planned it. A watch designed to survive a thousand meters of crushing ocean, strapped to a man whose deepest dive is into a longbox of old comics, is the kind of small, accidental rhyme the costume department probably never thought about and the camera caught anyway.