Ryan Gosling wears an Omega Speedmaster

Damien Chazelle's First Man (2018) follows Neil Armstrong from the Gemini program to the surface of the moon, with Ryan Gosling playing him as a quiet, grief-shadowed man who keeps almost everything inside. Omega dressed the production to the period, so Gosling wears three different watches across the film: a 1950s Omega CK 2605 at home, a Speedmaster reference 105.003 through NASA training, and the reference 105.012 for the Apollo 11 mission.

The Speedmaster earned its place in that history by surviving a process the film only glances at. In the mid-1960s NASA went looking for a chronograph it could flight-qualify and asked several watchmakers to submit one. Hamilton sent a pocket watch and was disqualified on the spot for not being a wristwatch. The three that actually went through the gauntlet, baked and frozen and shaken and dropped into a vacuum, were the Omega Speedmaster, a Rolex, and a Longines-Wittnauer. Only the Omega survived, and in 1965 NASA certified it for every crewed mission.

The most-told chapter is the one the watch's owner did not quite get to star in. Armstrong carried his Speedmaster to the moon in July 1969, but when the lunar module's mission timer failed he left the watch behind in the cabin to stand in as the backup clock. So when the hatch opened, it was Buzz Aldrin, second man down the ladder, whose Speedmaster became the first watch worn on the moon. It is the rare movie watch whose real history outweighs the character wearing it on screen.