Simon Pegg wears a Casio G-Shock

Benji Dunn is the technician in Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol, the man behind the laptops and the gadgets who keeps getting pulled into the field. In one quiet beat, Simon Pegg sits with his hands clasped under his chin, thinking, and on his wrist is a fat black square Casio G-Shock.

Up close it is plainly a G-Shock: the square resin case, the big digital readout, the bezel built to take a beating. The community that tracks these things has settled on the GX-56, the oversized solar-powered model some collectors nicknamed the King for its size, in the all-black GX56-1B finish. The brand is not in doubt. The exact reference is the enthusiasts' best read, not something the film ever spells out.

The G-Shock exists because of a broken watch. In 1983 a Casio engineer named Kikuo Ibe dropped a watch his father had given him and watched it shatter on the pavement. He spent two years and more than two hundred prototypes chasing a case that could survive a fall, and the result, the DW-5000C, started a line built entirely on toughness. The watch on Benji's wrist is a distant, solar-powered descendant of that first one.