Patrick Wilson wears an Omega Speedmaster

Roland Emmerich's Moonfall (2022) is a disaster film in which the moon turns out to be a hollow alien megastructure, knocked from its orbit and falling toward Earth. Patrick Wilson plays Brian Harper, a former astronaut whose shuttle was attacked by something he could not explain on a 2011 mission that killed a crewmate. NASA did not believe him, and he lost his career for saying it out loud. When the moon starts coming down, he turns out to have been right.

Harper wears an Omega Speedmaster Professional, the Moonwatch, in the 42mm steel version powered by the Co-Axial Master Chronometer caliber 3861 that Omega introduced in 2021 to replace the long-running 1861. Omega placed the watch, and the studio leaned into a fit that writes itself: the Speedmaster has been NASA's qualified watch for every crewed mission since 1965, so strapping one to an astronaut is the rare product placement that doubles as accurate casting.

What is unusual is that the film actually uses the chronograph. Harper sets it running with exactly 28 minutes to impact, one of the few times a movie puts a Speedmaster to work as the stopwatch it is. The moment restages the watch's real claim to fame: when the crew of Apollo 13 had to time a critical 14-second engine burn by hand in 1970, they did it with a Speedmaster, and the watch came home a legend. Moonfall gives its astronaut the same instrument for the same kind of job, with the whole planet on the clock instead of a single crew.