New Year, Old Warnings: Lessons from Films Set in 2026 Teach Us?
The date 2025 might sound increasingly advanced. Maybe it's the sound of the consonant "f" in "five". However 2026 signifies a leap forward, and it's where we find ourselves, with every science-fiction-style advancement – chiefly the widespread adoption of AI – seeming dystopian, or possibly more grim. (It often seems like in a proper dystopia, the brain-numbing corporate-sponsored dehumanizing technology might operate a bit better?) Didn't anyone sound the alarm about this?
The response, particularly concerning our sci-fi movies made long ago (or sometimes recently) positioned in 2026, is a mixed bag. Some of these prophecies are universally relevant (worldwide disaster) but in detail implausible (if humanity is inevitably ravaged, we will almost certainly bring down the primate species alongside us). Some of them are visionary; others just look like bad visual effects. Yet it remains valuable to explore where various film-makers, from geniuses to grunts, thought we'd be positioned by now in the world's development. Therefore, we shall examine at some of the movies that have been depicted in 2026 throughout cinematic history and see if they have anything to impart.
The Game 'Doom'
Now, this isn't promising. In the universe of the video game adaptation *Doom*, whose two-decade milestone was recently celebrated by hardly anyone, 2026 is the year that humanity finds a portal to an long-lost metropolis on Mars, where the people of Earth can establish a research facility. Now, the negative events – in terms of narrative and concerning over-the-top film versions of a FPS video game – does not actually transpire for two more decades in the future, so even if we find a portal to Mars now, we could gain some time to avert true disaster. Were we to discover a passageway 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 wasn't something he funded himself, enabling him to assert messianic ownership for humanity's journey into the stars. That's before we consider the collection of extraterrestrial genetics and subsequent mutations into monstrous beings. (Again, this is nearer 2046, distinct from the Wong Kar-wai film.) Overall, *Doom* is (at the very least) a useful example for the reasons we allow Mars serve as a stretch-goal hope for humanity. Be it in John Carpenter's chintzy genre hybrid *Ghosts of Mars*, the more grounded sci-fi of *Red Planet*, or the woo-woo spiritualism of *Mission to Mars*, our far-off planet doesn't tend to serve as a beacon of hope. If anyone wants to close that dubious Martian real estate sale, maybe they should start with first ensuring the fictional depiction appear appealing.
The Marvel Dregs
One of the strangest features of the present Marvel Cinematic Universe is the way it handles the multiple world-threatening disasters, including a five-year time-jump whose events are largely undepicted in the movies themselves; the movies have become like a clock radio constantly set a few seconds fast – except with minutes, it's annual increments. So there's a whole bunch of MCU content that various wikis helpfully explain to be set in 2026. The good ones, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underrated adventure *The Marvels*, take place distant from Earth, and so feel quite detached from any concrete sense of time. However the poorer material is some of the worst Marvel has created: the nonsensically meandering TV show *Secret Invasion* and the Zoom-call farce of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Based on this stuff, we're facing a great deal of frustrating stagnation in 2026, along with the related spin that in truth, this nonsensical crap unfolding in front of us is crucial to future events. Even worse, in the real world that assertion will probably turn out to be accurate.
The Apes Saga Continues
Most of the original five-film *Planet of the Apes* cycle is located in the further-flung future of Earth, but the modern series that began with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* starts closer to home, initiating its timeline around 2016. So by the time a pathogen that knocks out most of Earth’s people has done its damage, and also enhanced the cognitive abilities of primates, it’s merely 2026, with additional human indignities (and simian triumphs) ahead. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, depicting how swiftly this contagion spreads globally and taking place around 2019, looks profoundly unsettling in the aftermath of the actual pandemic that would begin in 2020. By comparison, the movie *Dawn* seems more abstract; astonishingly, we’re now six years out from the onset of Covid-19, and society, though clearly wounded by the still-spreading virus, was not wiped out, and technological infrastructure certainly has not been disabled. But this bleakest of the quartet of contemporary *Apes* movies (to date!) still has a substantial bummer to offer, implying that human and/or ape nature, however one defines each, will unavoidably result in warfare, regardless of the efforts of the most well-meaning individuals. We’re subject to the whims of those who exploit others’ worst instincts, even if those instincts are not held by the majority. Currently, it feels hard to argue with that, even though we probably should.
The Silent Classic
By far the best-known depiction of 2026 in film is from a movie nearing marking its 100th anniversary. The director's iconic silent film *Metropolis* is set in a futuristic city where wealthy industrialists lord over the skyscrapers as workers work tirelessly below the surface on the equipment that power the city. Affluent city-dweller Freder, scion of the city’s master, has his eyes opened to these enormous class divisions when he becomes obsessed with Maria, an underground activist who preaches a coming together of the two halves of Metropolis. A inventor with more radical plans builds a automaton in her image, aiming to tear the whole of Metropolis to ruin. Here, a robot designed to mimic a human isn't a tool of the elite, but an entity who desires to see them destroyed; it's one element flipped by reality in a future that in other ways seems to be well on its way. *Metropolis* also envisions a world where advanced machinery relies on old-fashioned human toil, which appears as a perfect fusion of conservative contempt for “unskilled workers” and corporate enthusiasm for an AI bubble. It hasn't yet materialized, but it's simple to imagine a somewhat more utilitarian iteration of Lang’s city growing with the prospect of a resurgence to industrial production. The more complex, harder-to-imagine accomplishment is the ending of the film, where the chasm between the haves and the have-nots is bridged with compassion; rather than with concrete reforms. Like *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie advocates coexistence; in contrast to *Dawn*, it seems optimistic about the chance
