John Turturro wears an Oakley Detonator

A hand reaches into a foam-cut case of pistols and lifts one out, and the watch on the wrist catches the light: a sculpted wedge of steel over a blood-red dial. The case is stamped with the crest of Sector Seven, the government agency that hunted alien machines before it was shut down. The hand belongs to Seymour Simmons. John Turturro has played Simmons since the first Transformers, the Sector Seven man who started as Sam Witwicky's antagonist and became his ally, and by Dark of the Moon, Michael Bay's 2011 third film, Simmons has turned the whole alien ordeal into a bestselling memoir and a small fortune, trailed everywhere by his assistant Dutch.

The watch is an Oakley Detonator, the red-dial version. Oakley, the sunglasses company, spent the 2000s making wristwatches that looked like machined ordnance, and the Detonator is the loudest of them: a quartz chronograph in impact-forged stainless steel, the case sculpted so it pours straight into an integrated strap of the company's Unobtainium rubber, the Oakley ellipse set at three o'clock on the dial. It ran a few hundred dollars new. It looks less like a watch than like a part pried off a robot.

So the man who turned alien machines into a career wears a watch built to look like one. Oakley left the watch business in 2015, which leaves the Detonator about as defunct as the agency stamped on the case it came from: a discontinued machine on the wrist of a man who made his name on a shut-down one.