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 been able to name. Enthusiasts who have studied the frames describe a small digital unit with a cylindrical protrusion along the top edge of the case and three buttons across the face, something that looks like a dive computer, but it matches no catalogued model from Suunto or anyone else, and the consensus is that it is a film prop rather than a product placement. Fratello Watches, surveying the space movies of the era, simply calls it a nondescript digital wrist computer. 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 that 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 that the watch community is still arguing about what it is. For a long time this record listed the watch as a Suunto Vyper Novo. That was never going to hold, and not only because no source supports it. The Vyper Novo did not reach the market until around 2014, a year after the film, so it could not have been on the wrist of anyone in 2013.