Sandra Bullock wears an unidentified watch

Six hundred kilometers above the Earth, on a spacewalk to service the Hubble telescope, Dr. Ryan Stone is a medical engineer on her first shuttle mission when Russian satellite debris tears the Explorer apart and leaves her tumbling alone in orbit. Sandra Bullock plays Stone in Alfonso Cuaron's Gravity (2013), and the strange thing, for a film so concerned with instruments and survival, is that the watch on her wrist is one nobody has managed to name. What the frames show is a small digital unit with a cylindrical protrusion along the top edge of the case and three buttons across the face, something like a dive computer, but it matches no catalogued model from Suunto or anyone else and reads as a film prop rather than a product.

The identifiable watch in Gravity belongs to the other lead. George Clooney, as the veteran astronaut Matt Kowalski, wears an Omega Speedmaster Professional, the Moonwatch NASA actually qualified for flight, which is a quietly perfect joke: the movie hands its famous space watch to the man who drifts off into the dark, and gives its survivor an instrument so generic it cannot be identified at all. The Suunto Vyper Novo sometimes named for it could not be right, and not only for lack of evidence. The Vyper Novo did not reach the market until around 2014, a year after the film, so it could not have been on anyone's wrist in 2013.