New Year, Old Warnings: What Can 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 represents one step beyond, and it's where we currently stand, with every futuristic advancement – chiefly the broad integration of artificial intelligence – seeming bleak, or perhaps even worse. (It often seems like in a proper dystopia, the brain-numbing corporate-backed dehumanizing technology would actually operate a bit better?) Did no one warn us regarding this?
The answer, at least concerning science fiction films made long ago (or sometimes recently) set in 2026, is both yes and no. A number of these prophecies are broadly applicable (worldwide disaster) but in detail far-fetched (if humanity is inevitably decimated, we will almost certainly bring down the ape population with us). Others of them are visionary; the rest just resemble poor green screen. But it's worth examining where various film-makers, ranging from masters to journeymen, thought we'd be situated by this time in the world's development. Therefore, we shall examine a selection of the films that have been depicted in 2026 throughout cinematic history and see if they contain any lessons to impart.
The Game 'Doom'
Well, this isn't promising. In the universe of the video game adaptation *Doom*, whose 20th anniversary was recently celebrated by virtually no one, 2026 is the year that mankind finds a gateway to an ancient city on Mars, where the people of Earth are able to set up a scientific outpost. Currently, the bad stuff – regarding plot and in terms of over-the-top film versions of a first-person-shooter video game – doesn't really transpire for another 20 years in the future, so even if we find a portal to Mars now, we could gain a respite to avoid true disaster. Were we to uncover a passageway to an old Martian city, it's truly hard to tell whether Elon Musk 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 even get to the harvesting of extraterrestrial genetics and subsequent mutations into monstrous beings. (Again, this is closer to 2046, distinct from the Wong Kar-wai film.) Overall, *Doom* is (if nothing else) a good test case for the reasons we let Mars serve as a stretch-goal hope for mankind. Whether in the director's chintzy genre hybrid *Ghosts of Mars*, the realistic science fiction of *Red Planet*, or the woo-woo spiritualism of *Mission to Mars*, our distant neighbor planet rarely serve as a symbol of hope. If anyone wants to make that dubious Martian real estate sale, perhaps they should start with at least ensuring the fantasy version look good.
Marvel's Lesser Offerings
One of the goofiest quirks of the present Marvel Cinematic Universe is the way it handles the various global disasters, encompassing a five-year time-jump whose events are largely not shown in the movies themselves; the movies have become like a alarm clock perpetually set a few seconds fast – only instead of minutes, it's annual increments. Consequently, there exists a large assortment of Marvel stuff that fan sites helpfully explain to be set in 2026. The good ones, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underappreciated romp *The Marvels*, occur far away from Earth, and so seem pretty unmoored from our sense of time. However the poorer material is some of the worst the studio has created: the nonsensically meandering TV show *Secret Invasion* and the Zoom-call debacle of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Based on these examples, we're in for a great deal of annoying stagnation in 2026, along with the related narrative that in truth, this nonsensical crap unfolding before our eyes is crucial to future events. Even worse, in the real world that claim will likely turn out to be correct.
The Apes Saga Continues
Most of the original five-film *Planet of the Apes* cycle is set in the more distant future of Earth, but the modern series that began with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* starts nearer the present, initiating its timeline around 2016. Thus, when a pathogen that devastates the majority of Earth’s people has run its course, and also enhanced the cognitive abilities of primates, it’s merely 2026, with further setbacks for mankind (and victories for apes) ahead. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, illustrating how swiftly this virus propagates globally and taking place in 2019, appears downright eerie in the wake of the real-world pandemic that would dawn in 2020. By comparison, the movie *Dawn* seems more abstract; astonishingly, we’re now six years out from the spread of Covid-19, and humanity, though obviously wounded by the ongoing virus, was not wiped out, and our technology certainly hasn't been knocked out. Yet this most pessimistic of the quartet of contemporary *Apes* movies (to date!) nonetheless contains a significant bummer in store, implying that human and/or ape nature, however one defines each, will unavoidably lead to violent conflict, regardless of the efforts of the best-intentioned among us. We’re at the mercy of those who exploit others’ baser impulses, even if those instincts are not held by the majority. Currently, it seems hard to argue with that, even though we ought to try.
The Silent Classic
Easily the most prominent depiction of 2026 in cinema is from a movie nearing marking its centennial. Fritz Lang’s silent classic *Metropolis* is set in a city of tomorrow where wealthy industrialists preside over the skyscrapers as laborers toil underground on the equipment that power the city. Affluent surface resident Freder, scion of the city’s ruler, has his perspective changed to these enormous social gaps when he falls for Maria, an subterranean activist who advocates for a coming together of the separate strata of Metropolis. A scientist with darker plans creates a automaton in her image, aiming to tear the entire Metropolis to ruin. Here, a robot created to imitate a human does not serve as an instrument of the elite, but someone who wants to see them destroyed; it's one element flipped by reality in a future that in other ways appears to be well on its way. *Metropolis* also envisions a world where advanced machinery relies on traditional manual labor, which appears as a most logical union of conservative disdain for “unskilled workers” and business zeal for an tech boom. It hasn't yet materialized, but it's simple to picture a slightly less stylish-looking version of Lang’s city growing with the promise of a resurgence to industrial production. The trickier, less plausible accomplishment is the ending of the film, where the gap between the haves and the have-nots is spanned with compassion; rather than with specific policies. Like *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie advocates peaceful cohabitation; in contrast to *Dawn*, it seems hopeful about the chance
