New Year, Old Warnings: What Can Films Placed in 2026 Teach Us?
The year 2025 could appear more futuristic. Maybe it's the presence of the consonant "f" in "five". But 2026 signifies a leap forward, and it's where we find ourselves, with each science-fiction-style advancement – chiefly the widespread adoption of AI – seeming bleak, or possibly even worse. (Doesn't it feel like in a true dystopia, the mind-dulling corporate-backed dehumanizing technology might function a bit better?) Didn't anyone warn us about this?
The answer, particularly regarding science fiction films from years ago (or occasionally months ago) set in 2026, is both yes and no. A number of those warnings are broadly applicable (global catastrophe) but specifically implausible (if humanity is ultimately ravaged, we will most likely take the primate species alongside us). Some of them are visionary; the rest just resemble poor visual effects. Yet it remains worth examining where different film-makers, ranging from masters to grunts, believed we'd be positioned by this time in our planet's evolution. Therefore, we shall take a look at some of the movies that have been depicted in 2026 over the years and determine if they contain any lessons to impart.
The Game 'Doom'
Well, this doesn't bode well. In the universe of the video game adaptation *Doom*, whose 20th anniversary was recently celebrated by virtually no one, 2026 is the year that humanity finds a portal to an ancient city on Mars, where the people of Earth are able to set up a scientific outpost. Currently, the bad stuff – in terms of plot and in terms of over-the-top cinematic imitations of a FPS video game – doesn't really go down for another 20 years in the future, so should we do discover a portal to Mars now, we could gain some time to avoid true disaster. Were we to uncover a portal to an ancient Martian city, it's truly hard to determine whether a certain tech billionaire would still be extremely excited to send everyone to Mars or would immediately turn disheartened that the portal wasn't something he funded himself, enabling him to claim messianic ownership for mankind's journey into the stars. This precedes we consider the collection of Martian chromosomes and subsequent mutations into horrific creatures. (Once more, this is closer to 2046, not to be confused with the Wong Kar-wai film.) In general, *Doom* is (at the very least) a useful example for why, exactly we let Mars serve as a long-term hope for mankind. Whether in the director's chintzy genre hybrid *Ghosts of Mars*, the realistic science fiction of *Red Planet*, or the woo-woo mysticism of *Mission to Mars*, our far-off planet rarely serve as a beacon of hope. If anyone wants to make that dubious red-planet real estate sale, maybe they ought to begin with at least ensuring the fantasy version appear appealing.
The Marvel Dregs
A of the strangest features of the current MCU is the way it handles the multiple world-threatening disasters, encompassing a five-year time-jump whose events are mostly undepicted in the films themselves; the movies have become like a clock radio constantly running a few minutes fast – only instead of minutes, it's annual increments. So there's a large assortment of Marvel stuff that fan sites clarify to be set in 2026. The good ones, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underrated adventure *The Marvels*, occur far away from Earth, and so feel pretty detached from our sense of time. But the poorer material is among the weakest Marvel has created: the convoluted and aimless TV show *Secret Invasion* and the remote-meeting farce of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Judging by this stuff, we're facing a great deal of frustrating stagnation in 2026, including the accompanying narrative that actually, this nonsensical crap happening before our eyes is essential to whatever happens next. Even worse, in the actual world that assertion will probably prove accurate.
The Apes Saga Continues
The majority of the original five-movie *Planet of the Apes* cycle is set in the more distant tomorrow of Earth, but the modern series that began with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* starts nearer the present, initiating its chronology approximately 2016. Thus, when a pathogen that devastates most of Earth’s human population has run its course, and simultaneously enhanced the cognitive abilities of primates, it’s only 2026, with additional human indignities (and victories for apes) ahead. The post-credits scene of *Rise*, illustrating how swiftly this virus propagates globally and taking place around 2019, looks profoundly unsettling in the wake of the actual global health crisis that would dawn in 2020. In contrast, the movie *Dawn* looks less literal; astonishingly, we’re now six years out from the onset of Covid-19, and humanity, though clearly wounded by the still-spreading virus, hasn't been annihilated, and our technology definitely has not been disabled. But this most pessimistic of the quartet of contemporary *Apes* movies (to date!) nonetheless contains a substantial bummer to offer, suggesting that human and/or ape nature, whatever qualifies as each, will unavoidably lead to violent conflict, regardless of the efforts of the most well-meaning among us. We’re subject to the whims of those who appeal to others’ worst instincts, although those drives don't represent the most. Right now, it seems difficult to argue with that, despite the fact that we probably should.
Metropolis
Easily the best-known portrayal of 2026 in cinema is from a movie close to celebrating its 100th anniversary. Fritz Lang’s silent classic *Metropolis* takes place in a city of tomorrow where rich businessmen preside over the skyscrapers as workers work tirelessly below the surface on the equipment that keep everything running. Affluent city-dweller Freder, son of the city’s master, has his eyes opened to these enormous class divisions when he becomes obsessed with Maria, an subterranean activist who preaches a reconciliation of the two halves of Metropolis. A scientist with darker plans creates a automaton in her image, aiming to tear the whole of Metropolis down in flames. Here, a machine designed to mimic a human isn't a tool of the elite, but someone who wants to witness their downfall; it's one element inverted by reality in a vision of tomorrow that in other ways seems to be progressing. *Metropolis* also envisions a world where advanced machinery depends on traditional manual labor, which seems like a perfect fusion of rightwing contempt for “unskilled workers” and business zeal for an tech boom. It hasn't yet materialized, but it's simple to picture a slightly less stylish-looking version of Lang’s city expanding out with the prospect of a resurgence to manufacturing. The trickier, less plausible accomplishment is the conclusion of the film, where the chasm between the haves and the poor is spanned with compassion; rather than with specific policies. Like *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie advocates coexistence; unlike *Dawn*, it appears optimistic about the chance
