Frances McDormand wears an unidentified watch

In the frame from Transformers: Dark of the Moon, Frances McDormand stands with her arms crossed and a laminated intelligence badge at her chest, a dark watch just showing at the wrist tucked under her elbow. She plays Charlotte Mearing, the Director of National Intelligence, the official who rides herd on the secret NEST program and treats the Autobots as an asset to manage rather than allies to thank.

Mearing is the unimpressed adult in Michael Bay's 2011 third film, demanding answers while Chicago is pulled apart by Decepticons hunting a Cybertronian ship the Apollo missions were quietly sent to find. The film hands her a running history with Seymour Simmons, the blustering ex-agent who knew her years ago and steals a kiss from her in the coda, to her brief and furious surprise.

The watch stays a dark shape beneath the crossed arm, no dial or maker legible, so the brand goes unrecorded. McDormand had already won an Academy Award for Fargo and would take two more in the decade after, a caliber of actor Bay rarely lands, here playing the one person in the film who never once looks at the giant machines with anything like wonder.