Taylor Kitsch wears a Luminox 3901

Peter Berg's Battleship is a two-hour recruiting reel for the United States Navy that happens to be adapted from a Hasbro board game. Taylor Kitsch plays Lieutenant Alex Hopper, a gifted and barely governable young officer who starts the film one disciplinary hearing from washing out and ends it commanding a destroyer against an alien fleet off Hawaii. The still catches him mid-crisis, bloodied, in working camouflage, shouting into a sound-powered handset, the kind of phone a warship falls back on when everything with a circuit board has failed.

On his wrist is a Luminox, the name just legible on the black dial. It is the 3901, from the line Luminox built around the United States Navy SEALs, and its whole idea is light. Tiny tritium gas tubes are set into the dial and hands, and they glow on their own for years, with no battery feeding the glow and no button to press and no lamp to charge them under first. That is a watch for someone who has to read the time face down in black water, which is to say a watch with a real job, worn by a character who is all instinct and no polish. Elsewhere in the same film, Liam Neeson's Admiral Shane wears a dressier Hamilton aviation chronograph. The lieutenant gets the issue tool and the admiral gets the watch you wear to be saluted in.