Taking Sides: The Best James Bond Watch Is Not The Omega Seamaster

June 27 marks the 50th anniversary of the release of “Live and Let Die,” Roger Moore’s first appearance as the iconic British spy, James Bond. In celebration of the Bond who wore a wider variety of watches than any other, Jack Forster and Griffin Bartsch are devoting this edition of Taking Sides to try and answer, once and for all, an age-old question — what is the best Bond watch? Read Griffin’s take here.

Here at Taking Sides, we never met a low-stakes watch argument that we didn’t like, and although the question of which watch is the ideal James Bond watch is definitely not low stakes to the folks who make the films or, God knows, the companies who have provided the watches, you can’t get much more divorced from reality than arguing about what watch is the best fit for a person who never actually existed in the first place. Submitted for your approval: yet another entry in the interminably long list of whys, why-nots, and wherefores, of what James Bond should really be sporting on one of most endorsement-magnet wrists of all time.

First, of course, we must consider the present contender, as seen in the Daniel Craig James Bond films. While Craig’s Bond flirted briefly with the modern Walther P99 (suppressed, the better to shoot an off-the-reservation MI6 officer in an opening scene that re-established Bond as “her majesty’s blunt instrument”) before returning to the obsolete but time-honored Walther PPK, since 1995’s Goldeneye, the two most recent Bonds (Pierce Brosnan and Daniel Craig) have both worn variations of the Omega Seamaster 300M.

Now, there are several arguments pro and con, which generally come up when this watch is discussed. Before getting to them I feel obliged to point out that there is no animosity like that between followers of Omega and believers in Rolex and quite a lot of the pleasurably acrimonious discourse about James Bond watches is actually a cover for pleasurably acrimonious disagreement over which of the two brands is better. I will not be examining this perspective as I have managed to get this far in a career of writing about watches without attracting too many haters, so why start now?

The arguments pro and con for the Seamaster are fairly straightforward and altogether reasonable. They are, to wit, that first, those who toil in the more hazardous anonymous branches of the various clandestine services often gravitate towards tough, reliable, and somewhat prestigious mechanical watches – former SAS types with easy smiles and expensive watches, as Vesper Lynd put it in Casino Royale – not the one with David Niven – are as susceptible to finding Omega, Breitling, and Rolex watches (among others) cool as anyone else. The second argument is that Bond is canonically an ex-Royal Navy commander, and the Seamaster would be a natural choice for a former Navy man turned professional assassin (although to be fair, while Bond is licensed to kill, his executions of malefactors are not always the actual purpose of his missions; bad guys may be invited to expire as an incidental cost of intelligence gathering, not as the actual purpose of a given mission).

The problem with the notion that the Seamaster is the ultimate James Bond watch, is of course that there are other possibilities even within a single incarnation of the character, and if you look at both the literary, and all the cinematic James Bonds, you have vastly different personal styles – the smug edging-on-satire 70’s-era Lothario-isms of Roger Moore’s Bond are a far cry from the casual sadism of Sean Connery’s, who would have let himself be split from the nave to the chaps and have his head set upon Auric Goldfinger’s battlements, before deigning to appear in a movie called Octopussy. Even promiscuous psychopaths have their standards.

The question then becomes, what watches actually do suit the various incarnations of James Bond? Each of them has, of course, watches they have worn canonically but it is still interesting to consider what modern, current production watches would have fit each gent’s character. To wit:

• Sean Connery’s Bond: definite, pronounced distaste for anything flashy. A lover of blunt pleasures like caviar and scrambled eggs, not a devotee of luxury branding for its own sake. If in the business today, a sturdy watch, easily replaceable, that won’t divert funds from more important things like cars, promiscuity, gambling, and more promiscuity, would be apt – a Seiko diver, for instance.
• George Lazenby’s James Bond: GL only appeared in one Bond film – the unfairly oft-forgotten On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. Lazenby’s Bond wore Rolex but today, a dirty-tricks MI6 operative looking to settle down, get married, and get out of a hazardous game might just opt for a simple gold Patek Calatrava, in the hopes of not really owning it, but passing it on to the next genera- ooooh, too soon?
• Roger Moore’s Bond: a dandy, fond of blunt pleasures but not above showing off with wine lists, bell-bottomed silk suits, and ostentatious cigars in order to seem a suave sophisticado. Today I suspect such a gent would be apt to incline towards something that showed off both his desire to seem au courant and his desire to show off a little – a widely recognized hype watch like a steel 5711 (which on his salary he had better have stolen from the stash of some smirking, yacht-owning malefactor) would fit the bill nicely.

• Timothy Dalton’s James Bond: The Living Daylights strove to be edgier than Roger Moore’s Bond, but honestly, how seriously can you take someone who escapes from Soviet border guards by tobogganing away from them riding a cello case? I’m inclined to think that a Mickey Mouse watch in quartz might capture the combination of silliness and seriousness that characterized Dalton’s Bond, and lest you all think I’m throwing shade, let’s remember that if Mickey was good enough for The Da Vinci Code’s Richard Langdon, it ought to be good enough for Bond, James Bond.
• Pierce Brosnan’s James Bond: here we are on much more secure footing. The first appearance of the Omega Seamaster 300M in a Bond film was in Goldeneye, which for many younger (than me) Bond fans is the James Bond. Brosnan was Bond up until 2002’s Die Another Day (not to be confused with No Time To Die, AKA Wow, What A Time To Die!) and I think that the Seamaster 300M is perfect for Brosnan’s Bond. Sleek, elegant, practical, but also a very beautiful watch design that is now a modern classic, the Omega Seamaster 300M is the best possible James Bond watch – for Brosnan’s suave but ruthless, and never dandy-ish, James Bond.

Which Brings Us To The Latest Late Great 007

And now we come to the crux of the matter. Is the Omega Seamaster 300M the watch that Daniel Craig’s James Bond would have chosen?

Now this may seem like a cop-out at first, but I think that it would have been another Omega. I think he would have worn a Speedmaster. And I think he would have worn a Speedmaster with as much gold – Sedna, ordinary gold, Ceragold, I don’t think he would have necessarily cared what sort of gold, as long as it was gold and as much as his purse could tolerate.

Hello, 007. Image, Sony Pictures and Eon Productions

I think that when he did away with the “bent” MI6 Section Chief Dryden, in Prague, at the beginning of Casino Royale (not the one with David Niven) he might well have been still wearing an Omega Seamaster 300M and in canon, while it is unclear whether Craig’s 007 is in fact an ex-Royal Navy commander (it seems more likely that he was in fact ex-SAS, as the the pathway to a paramilitary role for one of the intelligence services is often through one of the Special Forces rather than from a commissioned officer rank). I also think that since 007’s OpSec is so horrendous (if your first operation as a double-Oh is publicly out-betting a known terrorist with British treasury money, you aren’t going to be clandestine within seconds after walking away from the baccarat table) he would not have caviled at buying a nicer watch to celebrate his promotion from having to talk to HR every time some bad guy has an accident, to getting a bonus when he makes it happen on purpose.

DC’s JB is a practical man but he likes the better things in life when he encounters them – business class on the TGV, lamb (“skewered”) and if someone surprises him with a dinner jacket that is actually tailored, after the first surprise is over with, he doesn’t mind one bit. He will never not be, fundamentally, all about the business but why not look good while you’re at work?

Therefore may I present to you, the gadget-loving modern James Bond’s new favorite watch: the Omega Speedmaster Professional in Moonshine Gold on a rubber strap. I think Craig’s Bond would have loved it. (Shoot, I love it). He would have loved the gold, he would have loved the timing functions (if a bomb is going to go boom, why not time it precisely?) he would have loved the c0-axial escapement (and I do think he would have gotten that far in terms of watch knowledge) and he would have loved the fact that it is less than half as expensive as a full-gold version on a gold bracelet – you don’t come of Scottish parents and throw money around. Would he have loved it after losing the only woman he ever loved? I think it would have been his secret – his last and only secret, because it would have been their secret.

He’s not in the business, he was the business. For a look at what one hard man in hard places wore to work, check out Tim Mosso’s Collector Conversations with former Navy SEAL Ron Huberty.