New Year, Familiar Warnings: Lessons from Films Placed in 2026 Teach Us?
The year 2025 might sound increasingly advanced. Perhaps it's the presence of the letter "f" in "five". However 2026 represents a leap forward, and it's where we find ourselves, with each science-fiction-style development – primarily the broad integration of artificial intelligence – seeming dystopian, or possibly more grim. (It often seems like in a proper dystopia, the brain-numbing corporate-backed dehumanizing technology might operate more effectively?) Didn't anyone sound the alarm about this?
The answer, at least concerning our sci-fi movies made long ago (or occasionally months ago) positioned in 2026, is a mixed bag. A number of those warnings are broadly applicable (worldwide disaster) but specifically far-fetched (if humanity is inevitably decimated, we will most likely bring down the ape population alongside us). Some of them are visionary; others just look like poor visual effects. Yet it remains worth examining where various film-makers, ranging from masters to journeymen, thought we'd be positioned by now in our planet's development. Therefore, we shall examine a selection of the movies that have been set in 2026 over the years and see if they have anything to teach us.
The Game 'Doom'
Well, this doesn't bode well. In the universe of the game-to-film translation *Doom*, whose 20th anniversary was noted by virtually no one, 2026 is the year that humanity finds a portal to an ancient city on Mars, where the inhabitants of Earth are able to set up a scientific outpost. Now, the negative events – in terms of plot and in terms of garish film versions of a FPS video game – doesn't really go down for another 20 years later, so even if we do discover a Martian gateway this year, we might have a respite to avoid catastrophe. Were we to discover a passageway to an old Martian city, it's genuinely difficult to determine whether Elon Musk would remain super-psyched to dispatch people to Mars or would immediately turn dejected that the discovery wasn't something he funded himself, enabling him to claim savior-like credit for humanity's journey into the stars. That's before we even get to the harvesting of extraterrestrial genetics and resulting mutations into horrific creatures. (Once more, this is nearer 2046, distinct from the Wong Kar-wai film.) Overall, *Doom* is (if nothing else) a useful example for the reasons we allow Mars serve as a long-term aspiration for mankind. Whether in John Carpenter'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 far-off planet rarely serve as a symbol of hope. If anyone wants to close that questionable Martian property deal, perhaps they ought to begin with first ensuring the fictional depiction appear appealing.
The Marvel Dregs
A of the goofiest quirks of the present Marvel Cinematic Universe is how to account for the multiple global cataclysms, including a five-year time-jump whose events are largely not shown in the films themselves; the films have turned into a clock radio constantly running a few minutes fast – except with minutes, it's annual increments. So there's a whole bunch of MCU content that various wikis clarify to be set in 2026. The better entries, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underrated romp *The Marvels*, take place far away from Earth, and so seem quite unmoored from our sense of time. But the bad stuff is among the weakest Marvel has ever produced: the convoluted and aimless TV show *Secret Invasion* and the remote-meeting debacle of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Judging by this stuff, we're in for a great deal of frustrating wheel-spinning in 2026, along with the accompanying spin that in truth, this nonsensical crap happening before our eyes is essential to future events. More troublingly, in the real world that claim will probably turn out to be accurate.
Dawn of the Planet of the Apes
Most of the classic five-film *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 closer to home, starting its timeline around 2016. Thus, when a pathogen that devastates the majority of Earth’s people has done its damage, and also enhanced the cognitive abilities of apes, it’s only 2026, with further human indignities (and simian triumphs) ahead. The post-credits scene of *Rise*, illustrating how rapidly this contagion propagates around the world and set in 2019, appears profoundly unsettling in the wake of the actual global health crisis that would dawn in 2020. By comparison, the movie *Dawn* looks more abstract; astonishingly, we’re now half a decade from the onset of Covid-19, and society, though clearly wounded by the ongoing virus, hasn't been annihilated, and our technology certainly hasn't been disabled. Yet this bleakest of the quartet of modern *Apes* movies (at least so far!) still has a significant downer to offer, suggesting that the fundamental nature of beings, whatever qualifies as each, will unavoidably result in warfare, regardless of the work of the most well-meaning individuals. We’re at the mercy of those who exploit others’ baser impulses, although those instincts don't represent the most. Currently, it feels hard to argue with that, despite the fact that we ought to try.
The Silent Classic
By far the best-known depiction of 2026 in cinema is from a movie nearing marking its 100th anniversary. The director's silent classic *Metropolis* takes place in a futuristic city where wealthy industrialists preside over the skyscrapers as laborers toil below the surface on the machines that keep everything running. Affluent surface resident Freder, scion of the city’s master, has his eyes opened to these enormous social gaps when he becomes obsessed with Maria, an underground organizer who preaches a reconciliation of the two halves of Metropolis. A inventor with darker plans creates a robot in her likeness, aiming to bring the whole of Metropolis to ruin. Here, a robot designed to mimic a human isn't a tool of the ruling corporate class, but someone who wants to see them destroyed; it's a component flipped by reality in a vision of tomorrow that in other ways seems to be well on its way. *Metropolis* also envisions a world where technology relies on traditional human toil, which appears as a most logical union of rightwing contempt for “the working class” and business enthusiasm for an AI bubble. It has not yet come to pass, but it's easy to picture a somewhat more utilitarian iteration of Lang’s city growing with the promise of a resurgence to industrial production. The trickier, harder-to-imagine accomplishment is the ending of the film, where the gap between the haves and the poor is bridged with compassion; rather than with concrete reforms. Like *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie advocates peaceful cohabitation; in contrast to *Dawn*, it seems hopeful about the possibility
