I was at the movies a couple of days ago, and the new Transformer’s trailer popped up. Now, I’m not really a Transformers fan – they were tolerable at one point, but I stopped watching after seeing whichever one it was that had a gratuitous up the skirt shot at the beginning, and no real plot.

Anyway, the trailer popped up, and I was slightly encouraged to see that a girl appeared to be the main character. She said things like ‘Fight Like a Girl,’ ‘Run Like a Girl’ etc and you could clearly see that this was going somewhere. I thought to myself : Oh good! an empowered female lead! With lines! Lines! 

Then the rest of the trailer happened. Despite the strong words, the female lead (at least in the trailer) appeared to be (yet again) surrounded by only males. There was one microsecond when I saw another female character, who was running, but that was it.

I really loved Rogue One but again, when there was an option to include women in the band that helped find the plans to the Deathstar, it was all men. I’m afraid that this Transformers movie will be exactly the same.

Look, I’m not against solo female leads, but seriously, the population is split 50/50 – do we really think that only the very occasional woman is going to be a freedom fighter? History around the world already tells us otherwise, and this is meant to be in the future, I assume, given the tech levels evident in the trailer.

I’ve just checked the Wikipedia entry and the IMDB entry. Unless I’m missing something, it looks as if this movie will yet again be heavily male centric. Wonder if it’ll pass the Bechdel Test?