Walker Scobell wears an Omega Speedmaster

A fighter pilot from the year 2050 crash-lands in the woods near his childhood home and meets himself at twelve. The kid takes convincing, and the watch does part of the work: both Adams wear their late father's Omega Speedmaster, and Hodinkee noted the watch "plays a role in their first encounter with one another, allowing for the younger Adam to truly believe he's speaking with his future self." The film hands the same Speedmaster to three wrists, Walker Scobell's young Adam, Ryan Reynolds's adult Adam, and Mark Ruffalo as the father who started it all, the physicist Hodinkee called "the godfather of time travel."

None of it was in the script. Hodinkee phoned the film's prop master, Dean Eilertson, who said Reynolds pitched the watch to director Shawn Levy, Levy loved it, and "then it became a mad panic to find Omega Speedmasters." Omega came through with four, one of them a stunt watch with a frozen mechanism. The straps carried the timeline: "Ryan's had a NATO strap because he was a pilot," Eilertson said, while "Young Adam's leather strap was in one condition and his father's was in another condition to show the passage of time."

The piece itself, by Hodinkee's read, is the previous-generation Speedmaster with the caliber 1861, since discontinued and replaced by the 3861: no step dial, and the dial text sits differently, down to the flat-topped A in the word Speedmaster. The read comes from a moment fifty-five minutes in. The damaged Time Fighter is down to its last jump, big Adam tells the kid the choice is his, and young Adam looks at his wrist. The camera punches in on the Speedmaster lying against the ship's window, a close-up so clear that Hodinkee identified the watch from it. The generation is not a slip. The film takes place mostly in 2022 and the watch belonged to Adam's recently deceased father, so an heirloom 1861 is exactly what should be on those wrists, a choice Hodinkee called "actually a great detail in the film."