Tyrese Gibson wears a MTM Patriot

By Transformers: Dark of the Moon, the third film of the run, Tyrese Gibson's Sergeant Epps has been fighting alien machines for two movies, and he is fighting them again here, flat on his stomach in the rubble of Chicago while a Decepticon stalks the smoke behind him. In the shot where he and Sam Witwicky crawl for cover, his arm is thrown forward in the dirt, and on his wrist is a chunky black tactical watch.

It is an MTM Patriot, the same watch Epps has worn since the first film. MTM documents Tyrese Gibson in the Patriot across the Transformers franchise, though their listing names the series rather than this particular installment, and on screen the watch is never still enough to read in detail. What is clear is the shape: a big, blacked-out field watch, exactly the one MTM sells.

The Patriot is a serious piece of kit. It runs a Japanese Miyota quartz movement inside a 44.5mm stainless steel case, with a unidirectional dive bezel, a sapphire crystal, two hundred meters of water resistance, and Super-LumiNova on the hands. It does not, despite what gets repeated online, use tritium tubes. It is a watch built to survive exactly the kind of day Epps is having.