Wang Zhi wears a Hamilton Jazzmaster

The camera holds on Wang Zhi in The Wandering Earth 2, a red mark high on one cheek, grinning inside a pressure suit stenciled SPACE ELEVATOR, another crew member seated to her right. She plays Han Duoduo, a trainee astronaut in Frant Gwo's 2023 prequel to his 2019 hit, the film that fills in how Liu Peiqiang, played by Wu Jing, came to crew the space station. Han Duoduo trains beside him and later marries him. They have a son, Liu Qi. She is the one who dies, of a cancer the rising solar radiation brings on.

Hamilton was the film's exclusive watch partner and, by its own account, supplied dozens of watches to dress the cast, so any watch on Han Duoduo's wrist is one of theirs. Which model, nobody pinned down, and the suit covers her wrists here anyway. The Hamilton worth naming is the one the brand made from scratch. Gwo, himself a Hamilton ambassador, asked its designers for a custom piece, and after several months they delivered a prop shaped around an old Chinese image, a round sky embracing a square earth. They built it literally. A round regulator dial, its hour and second hands lifted off the center onto their own small dials, sits inside a square transparent case 47 millimeters on a side. Hamilton says the dial is meant to show how human timekeeping changed over the last thousand years.

The image is an old one, and it describes a world that stays put: heaven a round dome above an earth that sits square and motionless. The movie is about the opposite. Humanity bolts thousands of engines to the planet and drives it out of the solar system to escape a sun that is swelling and cooking the Earth, the same radiation that gives Han Duoduo her cancer. Hamilton put the prop into production as the Jazzmaster Regulator Automatic Limited Edition, an automatic good for forty hours off the wrist and, on a watch made for a story about abandoning Earth, water resistant to thirty meters. It held each dial color to 122 pieces, a nod to the January 22 release, and sold them in June 2023 in mainland China only.