New Year, Old Warnings: What Can Films Placed in 2026 Teach Us?
The date 2025 might sound more futuristic. Perhaps it's the presence of the letter "f" in "five". However 2026 signifies a leap forward, and it's where we find ourselves, with every futuristic development – chiefly the widespread adoption of AI – appearing bleak, or perhaps more grim. (It often seems like in a proper dystopia, the brain-numbing corporate-sponsored anti-human technology might function a bit better?) Did no one warn us regarding this?
The response, particularly concerning science fiction films made long ago (or occasionally months ago) positioned in 2026, is both yes and no. A number of those warnings are broadly applicable (worldwide disaster) but specifically far-fetched (when mankind is inevitably decimated, we will almost certainly take the ape population with us). Some of them are visionary; the rest just resemble poor visual effects. Yet it remains valuable to explore where different directors, ranging from masters to grunts, thought we'd be situated by this time in our planet's evolution. Therefore, we shall take a look at some of the movies that have been set in 2026 throughout cinematic history and determine if they contain any lessons to impart.
Doom
Well, this doesn't bode well. According to the game-to-film translation *Doom*, whose two-decade milestone was recently celebrated by hardly anyone, 2026 is the year that humanity finds a gateway to an long-lost metropolis on Mars, where the people of Earth are able to establish a scientific outpost. Now, the negative events – regarding narrative and concerning over-the-top cinematic imitations of a FPS video game – doesn't really transpire for another 20 years in the future, so should we do discover a portal to Mars now, we might have some time to avert catastrophe. If we did uncover a passageway to an old Martian city, it's genuinely difficult to determine whether a certain tech billionaire would remain super-psyched to dispatch people to Mars or would immediately turn dejected that the portal was not a thing he funded himself, allowing him to claim messianic ownership for humanity's journey to the cosmos. That's before we consider the harvesting of Martian chromosomes and resulting mutations into horrific creatures. (Again, this is closer to 2046, distinct from the Wong Kar-wai film.) In general, *Doom* is (if nothing else) a useful example for why, exactly we let Mars serve as a long-term aspiration for mankind. Be it in the director's chintzy genre hybrid *Ghosts of Mars*, the more grounded science fiction of *Red Planet*, or the new-age mysticism of *Mission to Mars*, our distant neighbor planet rarely serve as a beacon of hope. Should someone wants to close that questionable red-planet property deal, perhaps they ought to begin with at least ensuring the fantasy version look good.
The Marvel Dregs
A of the strangest features of the current MCU is the way it handles the multiple global cataclysms, encompassing a half-decade leap whose events are mostly undepicted in the movies themselves; the films have turned into a clock radio perpetually set a few minutes fast – except with minutes, it's years. Consequently, there exists a whole bunch of Marvel stuff that various wikis clarify to be taking place in 2026. The better entries, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underrated adventure *The Marvels*, occur distant from Earth, and so feel quite detached from our sense of time. However the poorer material is some of the worst the studio has ever produced: the convoluted and aimless TV show *Secret Invasion* and the Zoom-call debacle of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Judging by these examples, we're in for a great deal of frustrating stagnation in 2026, along with the related narrative that in truth, this nonsensical crap unfolding before our eyes is crucial to whatever happens next. More troublingly, in the real world that claim will likely turn out to be accurate.
The Apes Saga Continues
The majority of the original five-film *Planet of the Apes* cycle is set in the further-flung tomorrow of Earth, but the new trilogy that started with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* begins nearer the present, starting its chronology around 2016. So by the time a virus that knocks out most of Earth’s people has done its damage, and also boosted the intelligence of primates, it’s merely 2026, with additional setbacks for mankind (and victories for apes) ahead. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, illustrating how swiftly this virus propagates around the world and set in 2019, appears profoundly unsettling in the wake of the actual pandemic that would dawn in 2020. By comparison, the movie *Dawn* looks less literal; if you can believe it, we’re already six years out from the onset of Covid-19, and society, though clearly impacted by the ongoing virus, hasn't been wiped out, and our technology definitely hasn't been disabled. But this most pessimistic of the quartet of contemporary *Apes* movies (at least so far!) still has a substantial downer to offer, implying that the fundamental nature of beings, however one defines either, will unavoidably lead to violent conflict, regardless of the efforts of the most well-meaning individuals. We’re subject to the whims of those who exploit others’ baser impulses, even if those instincts are not held by the most. Right now, it feels hard to dispute that, despite the fact that we probably should.
Metropolis
Easily the best-known portrayal of 2026 in film is from a movie close to celebrating its centennial. Fritz Lang’s iconic silent film *Metropolis* is set in a city of tomorrow where rich businessmen lord over the skyscrapers as laborers toil below the surface on the machines that power the city. Rich city-dweller Freder, son of the city’s master, has his perspective changed to these massive class divisions when he falls for Maria, an subterranean activist who preaches a coming together of the two halves of Metropolis. A scientist with more radical plans creates a automaton in her image, aiming to bring the entire Metropolis down in flames. Here, a robot created to imitate a human isn't a tool of the elite, but someone who wants to witness their downfall; it's one element flipped by reality in a vision of tomorrow that otherwise seems to be progressing. *Metropolis* also imagines a world where technology depends on old-fashioned manual labor, which appears as a perfect fusion of conservative disdain for “unskilled workers” and business enthusiasm for an tech boom. It has not yet materialized, but it's simple to imagine a slightly more utilitarian version of Lang’s city growing with the prospect of a resurgence to manufacturing. The trickier, harder-to-imagine accomplishment is the conclusion of the film, where the gap between the wealthy and the have-nots is bridged with love; rather than with specific policies. Similar to *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie advocates coexistence; in contrast to *Dawn*, it appears hopeful about the chance
