This lived up to every claim of being a videogame in the best of ways. It was funny and exciting. It had a really great female character. It was otherwise all men.

So, trailers. As I said, the ones before Maleficent were pretty good. This time…

Fake M&M trailer flunks – pretty sure the only female character was the one M&M, and she didn’t get any speech outside of possibly the final bit where everyone’s grumbling.

Expendables 3 – almost all guys, only speech guys. What a great reminder of how a problem perpetuates itself.

That alien teamup thing, pretty sure the only girl gets no dialogue at all while everyone else speaks multiple times. Also she is just there to be hot and a love interest and god damn you for combining the worst elements of movies and comics here.

Ape movie – technically, it’s hard to distinguish between ape sexes, so we can believe that they’re relatively equal in the crowd scenes. All speaking apes are male, all speaking humans are male, there’s one human woman who manages to gasp on camera and that’s it. I don’t know where the humans got the idea the apes are the problem when they’re going to die off all on their own.

Lawyer movie – dad and son reconciliation thing, manages to have several women speaking despite this so this is our winner for today.

The movie itself almost manages a Bechdel pass in that the news in the beginning is singing the praises of a female soldier, and several of the newspeople are female, but they don’t manage to speak to another woman about it.

I think this one has a better excuse than usual about not passing, in that the situation is almost entirely from the point of view of Main Character Guy, and unlike most of these, I think a good argument could be made that his intense belief the rules shouldn’t apply to him is a degree of entitlement you just wouldn’t see from a woman. That said, there were exactly two women in all, and the only way it could’ve passed as a result was to give the “The Angel of (Battle Name)” to the other woman, and then that’d have undercut the fact we finally have a guy refer to her like that and not the title she hated. Having two women in the quirky squad would’ve let them pass by talking to each other, as plenty of the quirky squad talk to each other, and having any of the commanding officers be female would probably have managed a pass there too. And, of course, having the crazy scientist be female means it would’ve passed too.

This is why I really hate when people complain about the test. It’s not about demanding an extra female character with no purpose is shoehorned in to say completely irrelevant dialogue after the movie is perfect. It’s about the fact plenty of men manage to talk to each other about various subjects all the time, and that most of the time, all you’d have to do to pass is have one of them be female instead.

This movie has a far better excuse for it than usual, in that it’s a place where it makes sense there’s few female characters and I really loved the one major female character we got, but it’s still playing into the existing problem.

I thought it was pretty solid otherwise – the sequence around the helicopter had him acting skeevy, but then we learn it isn’t him trying to trick her into sex. Similarly, I was annoyed the solution appeared to be to do it all himself, but then that turned out not to work either, and at the end she does the more difficult part to win.

It does have minor plot holes, chiefly the fact you can figure out a way to do anything but convince people of what’s happening, and that they didn’t just jam it in his leg right there, get the info, then suicide but tried to escape. Both were required for the plot, so it’s forgivable, but they make the ending even more unsatisfying because the fact it’s dead in the past means he can never explain what happened to the higher-ups, which means that if another of these aliens ever shows up we’ll be back in square one.

(Which would make for an interesting story in its own right – a future story where people find themselves beset by some mysterious monster that just as mysteriously stopped, and they have to try to dig up the story of the people in the past to figure out the solution.)