Deep inside the Chicago headquarters of technology company Kinetic Solutions Incorporated (KSI) is a top-secret military wing. During a tour of this facility, the company's supercilious CEO Joshua Joyce (Stanley Tucci) exhibits the ‘quantum leap’ that he believes will give KSI the edge on all global competitors. ‘It's the Holy Grail: Transformium’, an associate ( James Bachman) calls it, which Joyce jumps in to explain is a catchy, focus-grouped and trademarked moniker. What is so special about this substance? It is ‘programmable matter’, and now that KSI have ‘mapped’ its ‘genome’ they can control it as they see fit. To demonstrate this, Joyce lifts a small white ball from the table in front of him; the ball begins to float above his hand, before suddenly disassembling into a seemingly weightless, endlessly squirming cloud of small white cubes and intersecting geometric lines. ‘Sensual, almost’, Joyce comments as this cloud moves with sinuous elegance in the space between his hands. ‘Do you like music?’ he then asks, and the undulation of cubes suddenly coheres in his outstretched hand as a Beats Pill, a brand of portable Bluetooth speaker. ‘Perhaps something a little more violent?’ he prompts, and the substance morphs into a handgun.

This sequence takes place halfway through Transformers: Age of Extinction, a 2014 blockbuster. The subject of Kevin B. Lee's Premake video essay discussed in Chapter 1, the film is either a barrage of nonsensical and offensive spectacle or a trace of the ‘reinvention of cinema in the age of polymorphous and ubiquitous screen culture’, depending on who you ask (Koepnick 2018: 19). Indeed, it may well be both. This sequence, and the sub-plot it kick-starts involving an army of KSI-produced robot soldiers hijacked by the consciousness of franchise master-villain Megatron, indicates the film's own preoccupations with polymorphism. The enormous robot aliens of the series are heavy and machinic: they wreak palpable physical destruction and emit mechanical clunks and whirrs. But they are also light and digital, products of VFX work which, for all the perceptual realism in play, can seem disconnected from all physical surroundings. They shapeshift fluidly, impossibly, hypnotically, and fling themselves through space in inconceivable ways.