New Year, Familiar Warnings: What Can Films Set in 2026 Teach Us?
The year 2025 could appear more futuristic. Perhaps it's the presence of the letter "f" in "five". However 2026 represents one step beyond, and it's where we find ourselves, with every futuristic development – chiefly the widespread adoption of AI – seeming dystopian, or perhaps more grim. (Doesn't it feel like in a proper dystopia, the mind-dulling corporate-backed anti-human technology might operate more effectively?) Didn't anyone warn us about this?
The response, particularly regarding science fiction films made long ago (or sometimes recently) set in 2026, is a mixed bag. Some of these prophecies are universally relevant (global catastrophe) but in detail implausible (when mankind is ultimately decimated, we will almost certainly bring down the ape population with us). Others of them are visionary; the rest just look like bad visual effects. Yet it remains valuable to explore where different directors, from geniuses to grunts, thought we'd be situated by now in our planet's evolution. So let's take a look a selection of the movies that have been set in 2026 throughout cinematic history and determine if they have anything to teach us.
The Game 'Doom'
Now, this doesn't bode well. According to the video game adaptation *Doom*, whose 20th anniversary was noted by hardly anyone, 2026 is the year that mankind discovers a gateway to an ancient city on Mars, where the inhabitants of Earth can establish a scientific outpost. Currently, the bad stuff – in terms of narrative 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 find a Martian gateway this year, we might have some time to avert catastrophe. If we did uncover a portal to an ancient Martian city, it's truly hard to tell whether Elon Musk would remain super-psyched to dispatch people to Mars or would immediately turn disheartened that the discovery was not a thing he personally paid for, allowing him to assert savior-like ownership for humanity's expansion to the cosmos. This precedes we consider the harvesting of extraterrestrial genetics and subsequent transformations into monstrous beings. (Once more, this is closer to 2046, not to be confused with the acclaimed director's film.) Overall, *Doom* is (at the very least) a useful example for the reasons we let Mars serve as a stretch-goal hope for mankind. Be it in the director's cheap-looking genre hybrid *Ghosts of Mars*, the more grounded sci-fi of *Red Planet*, or the woo-woo mysticism of *Mission to Mars*, our distant neighbor planet rarely act as a beacon of optimism. If anyone wishes to close that dubious red-planet property deal, maybe they should start with at least making the fantasy version appear appealing.
Marvel's Lesser Offerings
One of the strangest features of the current MCU is how to account for the various global cataclysms, including a five-year time-jump whose occurrences are largely undepicted in the films themselves; the films have become like a alarm clock constantly running a few seconds fast – except with minutes, it's annual increments. Consequently, there exists a whole bunch of Marvel stuff that fan sites clarify to be set 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 pretty unmoored from our sense of time. However the bad stuff is some of the worst Marvel has ever produced: the convoluted and aimless TV show *Secret Invasion* and the Zoom-call debacle of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Based on this stuff, we're in for a great deal of frustrating stagnation in 2026, including the accompanying narrative that in truth, this nonsensical crap unfolding before our eyes is crucial to whatever happens next. Even worse, in the actual world that assertion will probably prove accurate.
Dawn of the Planet of the Apes
Most of the original five-movie *Planet of the Apes* cycle is located in the more distant future of Earth, but the new trilogy that began with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* starts closer to home, initiating its chronology around 2016. So by the time a pathogen that knocks out the majority of Earth’s human population has done its damage, and simultaneously enhanced the intelligence of apes, it’s only 2026, with further setbacks for mankind (and simian triumphs) ahead. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, depicting how rapidly this virus spreads globally and taking place around 2019, appears downright eerie in the aftermath of the real-world pandemic that would begin in 2020. By comparison, the movie *Dawn* seems more abstract; if you can believe it, we’re already six years out from the spread of Covid-19, and humanity, though clearly impacted by the still-spreading virus, hasn't been wiped out, and our technology certainly has not been disabled. But this most pessimistic of the quartet of modern *Apes* movies (at least so far!) still has a significant bummer in store, suggesting that the fundamental nature of beings, whatever qualifies as each, will unavoidably lead to violent conflict, no matter the work of the best-intentioned among us. We’re subject to the whims of those who appeal to others’ baser impulses, even if those instincts are not held by the majority. Currently, it feels difficult to dispute that, despite the fact that we probably should.
The Silent Classic
By far the most prominent depiction of 2026 in cinema is from a movie nearing celebrating its centennial. Fritz Lang’s iconic silent film *Metropolis* takes place in a futuristic city where wealthy industrialists lord over the skyscrapers as workers work tirelessly below the surface on the machines that keep everything running. Rich city-dweller Freder, son of the city’s ruler, has his perspective changed to these enormous social gaps when he falls for Maria, an subterranean activist who preaches a coming together of the separate strata of Metropolis. A scientist with more radical plans creates a robot in her image, hoping to bring the entire Metropolis to ruin. In this narrative, a machine created to imitate a human does not serve as an instrument of the elite, but an entity who wants to witness their downfall; it's a component flipped by the modern world in a vision of tomorrow that in other ways seems to be progressing. *Metropolis* also envisions a world where advanced machinery depends on old-fashioned manual labor, which seems like a perfect union of rightwing disdain for “the working class” and corporate zeal for an tech boom. It hasn't yet come to pass, but it's simple to picture a slightly less stylish-looking iteration of Lang’s city growing with the promise of a resurgence to industrial production. The more complex, harder-to-imagine accomplishment is the conclusion of the film, where the chasm between the wealthy and the have-nots is spanned with compassion; rather than with concrete reforms. Like *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie pleads for coexistence; in contrast to *Dawn*, it appears hopeful about the possibility
