New Year, Old Cautionary Tales: What Can Films Set in 2026 Teach Us?
The date 2025 could appear more futuristic. Perhaps it's the presence of the letter "f" in "five". However 2026 signifies one step beyond, and it's where we currently stand, with each futuristic development – primarily the broad integration of AI – appearing bleak, or possibly even worse. (It often seems like in a proper dystopia, the brain-numbing corporate-sponsored anti-human technology would actually operate more effectively?) Did no one warn us about this?
The response, at least concerning our sci-fi movies made long ago (or occasionally months ago) set in 2026, is both yes and no. Some of these prophecies are broadly applicable (global catastrophe) but specifically implausible (when mankind is ultimately decimated, we will most likely bring down the ape population with us). Others of them are prescient; others just look like poor visual effects. Yet it remains valuable to explore where different film-makers, ranging from masters to grunts, thought we'd be situated by this time in the world's evolution. So let's take a look a selection of the films that have been depicted in 2026 over the years and determine if they contain any lessons to teach us.
Doom
Well, this doesn't bode well. According to the game-to-film translation *Doom*, whose two-decade milestone was recently celebrated by virtually no one, 2026 is the year that humanity finds a gateway to an ancient city on Mars, where the inhabitants of Earth are able to establish a scientific outpost. Now, the bad stuff – in terms of plot and in terms of over-the-top film versions of a FPS video game – doesn't really transpire for another 20 years later, so should we find a Martian gateway now, we might have some time to avert catastrophe. If we did discover a portal to an old Martian city, it's truly hard to tell whether Elon Musk would remain super-psyched to send everyone to Mars or would instantly become disheartened that the discovery was not a thing he personally paid for, enabling him to assert messianic ownership for humanity's expansion to the cosmos. That's before we consider the collection of extraterrestrial genetics and subsequent mutations into horrific creatures. (Again, this is closer to 2046, distinct from the acclaimed director's film.) Overall, *Doom* is (if nothing else) a good test case for why, exactly we let Mars become a stretch-goal hope for humanity. Whether in the director's cheap-looking space-western *Ghosts of Mars*, the more grounded science fiction of *Red Planet*, or the new-age mysticism of *Mission to Mars*, our far-off planet doesn't tend to act as a beacon of hope. If anyone wishes to close that dubious red-planet real estate sale, perhaps they ought to begin with at least making the fictional depiction appear appealing.
The Marvel Dregs
A of the strangest features of the present MCU is how to account for the various global disasters, including a half-decade leap whose occurrences are mostly undepicted in the films themselves; the films have become like a clock radio constantly set a few seconds fast – except with minutes, it's annual increments. Consequently, there exists a large assortment of MCU content that various wikis helpfully explain to be set in 2026. The better entries, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underrated romp *The Marvels*, occur far away from Earth, and so seem quite unmoored from our sense of time. However the poorer material is some of the worst Marvel has created: the convoluted and aimless TV show *Secret Invasion* and the Zoom-call farce of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Based on this stuff, we're facing a whole lot of frustrating wheel-spinning in 2026, including the related spin that actually, this nonsensical crap happening before our eyes is crucial to future events. More troublingly, in the real world that claim will probably prove correct.
The Apes Saga Continues
Most of the original five-movie *Planet of the Apes* series is located in the further-flung future of Earth, but the new trilogy that began with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* starts nearer the present, starting its chronology approximately 2016. Thus, when a virus that devastates most of Earth’s human population has run its course, and also boosted the cognitive abilities of primates, it’s merely 2026, with additional setbacks for mankind (and simian triumphs) to come. The post-credits scene of *Rise*, depicting how swiftly this virus spreads around the world and taking place around 2019, looks profoundly unsettling in the wake of the actual pandemic that would begin in 2020. In contrast, the movie *Dawn* looks more abstract; astonishingly, 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 modern *Apes* movies (at least so far!) still has a substantial downer to offer, suggesting that the fundamental nature of beings, however one defines either, will inevitably result in violent conflict, no matter the work of the best-intentioned individuals. We’re at the mercy of those who appeal to others’ worst instincts, even if those instincts are not held by the majority. Currently, it seems difficult to argue with that, despite the fact that we probably should.
Metropolis
By far the most prominent depiction of 2026 in cinema is from a movie nearing celebrating its 100th anniversary. The director's silent classic *Metropolis* takes place in a futuristic city where rich businessmen preside over the skyscrapers as laborers toil below the surface on the equipment that keep everything running. Affluent surface resident Freder, son of the city’s ruler, has his eyes opened to these enormous social gaps when he falls for Maria, an subterranean activist who preaches a reconciliation of the separate strata of Metropolis. A scientist with more radical plans builds a robot in her image, hoping to bring the entire Metropolis to ruin. Here, a machine designed to imitate a human isn't a tool of the elite, but someone who wants to see them destroyed; it's a component inverted by the modern world in a vision of tomorrow that otherwise appears to be progressing. *Metropolis* also imagines a world where technology depends on traditional human toil, which appears as a most logical union of conservative contempt for “unskilled workers” and business enthusiasm for an AI bubble. It hasn't yet materialized, but it's easy to imagine a slightly more utilitarian version of Lang’s city growing with the promise of a return to manufacturing. The trickier, harder-to-imagine accomplishment is the conclusion of the film, where the chasm between the wealthy and the poor is bridged with love; not so much with concrete reforms. Similar to *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie pleads for coexistence; in contrast to *Dawn*, it appears hopeful about the possibility
