Seu Jorge wears a Vostok Amphibia

Team Zissou crowds down a staircase, wetsuited and armed, and one of them carries a yellow hard case, a small steel dive watch on the wrist above his grip, its domed crystal catching the light. He is Seu Jorge, playing Pele dos Santos, the crew's safety expert, who spends The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004) singing David Bowie songs in Portuguese on a guitar. Wes Anderson dressed the crew to match, down to the watch.

The watch is a Vostok Amphibia, made at the Chistopol factory since 1967 as the Soviet navy's cheap answer to the Blancpain Fifty Fathoms and the Rolex Submariner. It is rated to 200 meters, sealed by a quirk of engineering that uses the water's own pressure to clamp the caseback tighter the deeper it goes. New, it runs about a hundred dollars. The Fifty Fathoms and the Doxa that Jacques Cousteau actually wore on his dives cost many times that, and Steve Zissou is a knockoff Cousteau down to the wrist.

The depth rating buys nothing here. The Amphibia is built to seal against pressure it will never meet, worn by a crew of oceanographers who spend most of the movie on dry land in rubber suits, and by Pele between songs on his guitar. Propstore, which sold the actual watch in 2018, noted that its strap had been swapped from scene to scene. The hundred-dollar movement was still running.