Just Don't Come Back: 'Mayflower II'

More adventures in conservative Christian cinema.

File this one away (far away, like the Ark at the end of Raiders) under “Missed the Point Entirely”. I think the filmmakers took precisely the wrong takeaways from their childhood American History courses, not to mention the Bible, the news, and the film Elysium. There are invisibility cloaks, a spaceship, a colony on Mars, holograms, and criminalized Christianity: it’s Mayflower II.

Mayflower II begins sometime in the future, with two brothers on an incursion into a forbidden zone. We soon learn of the persecution faced by Christians in a dystopian society controlled by a surprisingly sparse cast of fascists. In this society, there are approved and unapproved churches, an “official” Bible and the one worshipped by “nonconformist Christian underground communities”. While almost every issue in the mind of right-wing Christians in the United States revolves around a divide between Christianity and secularism, Mayflower II imagines a future defined by a divide between “real” Christians and an imaginary state-sanctioned version of Christianity that for some reason the government enforces on people. It’s a worry also expressed, albeit more lightly, by the God’s Not Dead film series: that the government will attempt to control religious practices of Christians. But the God’s Not Dead films were ultimately feel-good dramas about just loving god; the paranoia of Mayflower II runs so deep that even Christianity is not a good enough litmus test. You must be the exact right kind of Christian.

Thankfully for the downtrodden Christians, there’s a savior named Solomon Foster – and I quote, “a highly successful businessman until he was forced out by some human rights commission because he wasn’t politically correct” – who secretly built a spaceship called the Mayflower II. One of the brothers and his wife flee in the ship to Mars, but Mars turns out to be a prison colony holding, you guessed it, Solomon Foster. During a prison break, Foster sacrifices himself to let the others escape, and I wish there was some sort of allusion I could draw on for a figure who sacrifices himself to save others. The escapees they take the ship back to Earth to rescue the other brother and his underground congregation, but not before a member of their group tries (but fails) to betray them to the authorities, and again, I’m wishing I had some sort of allusion for this. In the end, the radical fugitive Christians escape into space, like Jesus would have.

I take the same approach to this fundamentalist Christian space travel fantasy as to the actual space games of rich assholes like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk: it’s fine for them to blast off into space, but it’s when they come back that I get mad. Mayflower II may well be designed for the sort of fundamentalist Christian whose constant talk of Jesus has lately been matched by constant talk of crypto. If Jesus were alive today, he’d totally mine Bitcoin.

As a social drama, Mayflower II is almost exactly what you’d expect from the title. Historian Howard Zinn wrote in A People’s History of the United States: “I am supposing, or perhaps only hoping, that our future may be found in the past’s fugitive moments of compassion rather than in its solid centuries of warfare.” Well, Mayflower II is a future located in history’s “solid centuries of warfare”, if only through the sheer obliviousness of its titular allegory. From a white couple exclaiming “do we look like terrorists?” to the repeated references to political correctness, everything about Mayflower II seems tailor-made to compete in a 2020’s culture war landscape. It’s not a religious movie if you don’t take as many shots at the libs as you can.

Watching Mayflower II as a film, the Ed Wood comparisons come to mind, but that’s a comparison I’ll only tolerate because the makers of Mayflower II would probably bristle at the comparison to a genuinely transgressive cross-dressing sexploitation filmmaker and author. I absolutely love Edward D. Wood, Jr, and Mayflower II has none of Wood’s charm, wit, or storytelling brilliance. I’ll grant instead that Mayflower II is like a filmmaker doing their best Plan 9 from Outer Space impression, and somehow failing by making the film both too good and too bad. This film is less a film than a weird sermon filmed clumsily; the finished product screams “play for the kids at church so the teenagers watching them can sneak away to make out”.

So if you were worried that the Harry Potter series encouraged witchcraft but are now for some reason a big fan of J.K. Rowling as a person, then Mayflower II is a film you might show your kids. I say kids because it is hard to imagine adults sitting through this with a straight face. But again, it’s less a movie than a sermon, a way of telling parishioners to, in the words of Geena Davis in The Fly, “be afraid, be very afraid.” Not afraid of the actual threats to the United States or the world, but afraid of the totally imaginary threat of secularism. If your philosophy is predicated on Christian nationalism, anything short of total domination will feel like oppression and danger.

When I think of fundamentalist Christians I find myself turning over a description of Charles Foster Kane delivered by Joseph Cotten in Citizen Kane: “Not that Charlie was ever brutal, he just did brutal things.” It’s not that fundamentalist Christians in the U.S. are ever brutal, they just do brutal things. The meaningless yet apropos distinction speaks to the ways in which – in a quote attributed (falsely, according to Politifact) to Sinclair Lewis – “when fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross”.

In the case of Mayflower II, there’s little In the way of flags or crosses, just laser guns and spaceships. But then, everything in Mayflower II – from the settings to the characters to the futuristic technology – is so nondescript as to render the film nearly meaningless but as a coded message to those who already believe, who already understand the culture war being waged around them. Somehow, the worst I can say about Mayflower II is that it offers no new ideas, not even abhorrent ones, and instead only regurgitates right-wing talking points and Bible verses. It’s like listening to a parrot whose owner only ever turns off The 700 Club to watch reruns of Star Trek.

In short, skip over Mayflower II. It’s barely even worth a laugh at its expense.