Uma Thurman wears an Omega Constellation

Emma Peel sits beside John Steed on a striped sofa, poured into a red leather catsuit, one hand resting on his. It is the single most Emma Peel image the 1998 film manages, Uma Thurman doing her best with a role Diana Rigg made iconic on television and the movie keeps not quite earning. Jeremiah Chechik's The Avengers turns the British spy series into a weather-control caper, with Ralph Fiennes as Steed and Sean Connery as the villain who wants to sell storms to the highest bidder. The studio cut it from a hundred and fifteen minutes down to eighty-nine before release, losing most of the scenes that would have told you who these people were, and it made back less than it cost.

On the wrist of that red sleeve is a small steel watch on an integrated bracelet, its dark bezel and pale dial reading as an Omega Constellation, the Manhattan version Omega built its 1990s advertising around. The Manhattan is the one with the four little claws, two at three o'clock and two at nine, that grip the crystal down onto the case in place of an ordinary bezel. Omega added them in 1982 and they became the line's signature. Around 1995 the Roman numerals moved off the dial and onto the bezel, which is the version that fits a film made in 1998. The Constellation reads as pure 1990s luxury, which is the one thing this Avengers never stops being, however hard it reaches back to the 1960s for everything else.