Most of the time, a watch in a movie is just a watch: a very nice timepiece meant to tell you just a little more about Christian Bale, Arnold Schwarzenegger, or
Steve McQueen’s characters. But on rarer occasions, a visionary director like Stanley Kubrick, Christopher Nolan, or James Cameron dreams up a world so far removed from our own that regular timepieces just won’t do the trick. Take Cameron’s Aliens for example. It’s set in the year 2179, in a world where Sigourney Weaver and her crew encounter alien lifeforms. Can you really imagine them wearing the same watches that existed in 1986, the year the movie came out? A universe where everything else has advanced exponentially but watches have remained in stasis is no place I want to live. Thankfully, Cameron partnered with Seiko and legendary car designer Giorgetto Giugiaro to create a pair of sci-fi ready and xenomorph-ass-kicking watches.
Coming into contact with supernatural or extraterrestrial beings is always a good excuse to create a one-of-a-kind watch. When there’s something strange in your neighborhood, you know who you’re going to call. And when the Ghostbusters need a watch, they called Seiko. Elsewhere, Stanley Kubrick enlisted Hamilton for a watch that would fit nicely in 2001: A Space Odyssey’s very surreal universe. The brand was also tapped to provide pieces for Men in Black agents. Below, the best timepieces movie magic can conjure.
There’s something so charming about this simple design. Designer Giugiaro took one of Seiko’s existing chronograph watches, the 7A28, added a bar on the right-hand side, and positioned the pushers at either end. Voilà: a watch built for Ripley to wear almost 200 years in the future. Giugiaro, the man behind the DeLorean as well as concept designs for Aston Martin and Ferrari, makes cars that juxtapose voluptuous curves with hard angles, as if he considers the elbow the most attractive part of the body. That style is on display again here: a rectangular panel grafted onto the round dial of the Seiko.
The other watch Giugiaro designed for Aliens was just as, if not more, simple than the first. For Bishop’s watch, Giugiaro started with the same silhouette, but pushed the dial to the right, so the bracelet was offset. It’s a tiny tweak, but it’s so unlike anything a traditional watchmaker would do that it changes the entire feel of the timepiece. Both Ripley and Bishop’s pieces have become collector’s items in the vintage watch world and Seiko reissued the pair over the last decade.