Tom Hanks wears an Omega Seamaster

Viktor Navorski has no country and nowhere to be, which is the quiet joke buried in the watch on his wrist. He lands at JFK from the fictional republic of Krakozhia just as a coup back home voids his passport in mid-air, so he can neither enter the United States nor fly home, and he builds a life among the departure gates. To eat in those first stranded days he works out a small private economy: the airport pays a quarter for every abandoned luggage cart returned to its bay, and he lives off the quarters.

On his wrist through all of it is one of the most obscure watches Omega ever built, the Seamaster Memomatic, reference 166.072, from around 1970, the company's first and only mechanical alarm wristwatch. Inside the 40mm cushion-shaped steel case runs the automatic caliber 980, driving both the date and the alarm; the dial gives it away, three concentric rings, the outer keeping time, the two inner ones setting the alarm. It belonged to the small club of mechanical alarm watches that briefly mattered before quartz arrived, alongside the Jaeger-LeCoultre Memovox and the Tudor Advisor, all built to ring you awake somewhere you needed to be. That is the part a careful viewer enjoys. Steven Spielberg dresses a man whose whole predicament is that he has nowhere to be, and no schedule to keep, in the one Omega ever designed to sound an alarm. Spielberg staged the film almost entirely inside a working three-story terminal built in an aircraft hangar, and Navorski moves through it carrying a Planters peanut can of jazz autographs his late father collected, one signature short of complete. The Memomatic never gets a hero shot. It simply sits on the wrist of a man with all the time in the world and nowhere to spend it.