Robert Redford wears a Victorinox Officer's 1884

In 1991, on the day Nathan Muir plans to retire from the CIA, word arrives that his former protégé Tom Bishop, played by Brad Pitt, has been captured in China during an unsanctioned attempt to free a woman named Elizabeth Hadley. The United States and China are close to a major trade agreement, and Bishop's freelance mission threatens to wreck it. Tony Scott tells the story in flashbacks that move from Vietnam in 1975, where Bishop was a Marine Scout Sniper, to West Berlin in 1976, where Muir recruited him, to Beirut in 1985, while in the present Muir quietly turns the agency's own machinery toward a rescue, spending 282,000 dollars of his life savings and forging a directive from the Director of Central Intelligence to launch Operation Dinner Out, a rescue mission carried out by a SEAL team.

Through every one of those years, Muir wears the same watch on his right wrist: a Victorinox Swiss Army Officer's 1884 in stainless steel, with a white dial, a steel link bracelet, a quartz movement, and a second scale for reading 24-hour time. The 1884 in the name points to the year Karl Elsener opened the Swiss cutlery workshop that became Victorinox. The company then sold knives for another century before it sold a watch. The first Swiss Army watches appeared in 1989, marketed under the Swiss Army name by the Forschner Group with production handled by a separate Swiss firm, Xantia SA. The arithmetic does not work: in the Berlin scenes, set in the mid-seventies, Muir is wearing a watch that would not exist for more than a decade.

The watch was Redford's own. He often wore his personal watches in his films, and usually on the right wrist, which gave away his left-handedness.