The Speedmaster doesn’t play a watch on screen so much as reprise a role it already lived. Three moments when the Moonwatch stole the scene — one real, one recreated, one pure folklore.
Apollo 13 (1995) — fourteen seconds, timed by hand
April 1970: with the command module dying and the guidance computer powered down to save electricity and cooling water, the crew needed a precise 14-second course-correction burn to get home. Jack Swigert timed it on his Speedmaster. Jim Lovell later put it plainly: “We used the OMEGA watch that Jack had on his wrist… Jack timed the burn on the engine.”
Ron Howard’s film stages the moment faithfully — the burn, the held breath, the stopwatch logic of survival. Keep one honest footnote the movie softens: the watch was one part of a larger manual procedure. The crew had synchronized the lunar module’s event timer before the maneuver, and the backup guidance system was active for partial attitude control. The Speedmaster didn’t replace the spacecraft’s systems; it replaced the one instrument that was dark. That’s arguably the better story.
The mission earned Omega the Silver Snoopy Award from the astronauts themselves — the origin of every Snoopy-dial Speedmaster since.
First Man (2018) — period-correct down to the reference
Damien Chazelle’s Armstrong biopic took the watches seriously. Working with Omega’s headquarters in Bienne, the production equipped the cast with archive watches and specially made replicas — more than ten period-specific Speedmasters across two references. Ryan Gosling’s Armstrong wears the ST 105.003 in training scenes and the ST 105.012 for the mission itself: the same two references the real Armstrong wore, in the same order. Most films dress a decade; this one dressed the wrist.
“Ultraman” (1971) — the nickname from a television still
The ST 145.012-67’s orange chronograph seconds hand gave it one of collecting’s great nicknames — “Ultraman,” after the Japanese television hero whose color scheme it matched. The name traces to a still from the 1971 series The Return of Ultraman, spotted by a sharp-eyed collector. As this site’s reference guide notes, the nickname is collector folklore — but the watch is unambiguously real and unambiguously rare, and the orange hand is not a modification to be suspicious of but the entire point.
The through-line
Most watches on screen are props. The Speedmaster keeps showing up as evidence — of a burn that had to be timed, a mission that had to be dressed right, a hand color that sent collectors down a rabbit hole. That’s why it photographs differently from every other watch in the movies: it isn’t acting.