Tom Hardy wears an Omega CK2129

Christopher Nolan built Dunkirk (2017) as three interlocking clocks: the mole carries one week, the sea one day, the air one hour. Tom Hardy flies the shortest one. His Farrier is a Royal Air Force Spitfire pilot covering the evacuation, and when enemy fire smashes his fuel gauge early in the fight, the instrument that takes over is on his wrist: an Omega CK2129, the watch the RAF was actually issuing in 1940. He calculates what is left in his tanks against the Omega, and the camera keeps returning to it as the hour runs down.

The CK2129 was a tool in the strictest sense. Omega delivered roughly 2,000 of them to the Ministry of Defence at the beginning of the war, a sliver of the more than 110,000 pilot, navigator, and soldier watches the company supplied to Britain across the conflict. Aircrew used the rotating bezel to time intervals, bombing raids in particular, and a second, screwed crown at 4 o'clock locked the bezel so a knock in the cockpit could not shift it. Time+Tide reports that an Omega employee confirmed the film's watch as the "RAF" 1940, reference CK2129, and it was an authentic vintage example rather than a prop copy.

Farrier spends the film behind an oxygen mask, his eyes and his wrist doing most of the acting; Hardy shot the role inside purpose-built cockpit gimbals on a Palos Verdes cliffside, working in isolation from the rest of the production. The hour ends with the tanks dry: Farrier downs a dive-bomber as his fuel gives out, glides onto the beach beyond the perimeter, sets fire to his Spitfire, and is marched off a prisoner.