New Year, Familiar Cautionary Tales: What Can Films Placed in 2026 Teach Us?
The date 2025 might sound more futuristic. Maybe it's the presence of the letter "f" in "five". But 2026 signifies one step beyond, and it's where we find ourselves, with each futuristic advancement – chiefly the widespread adoption of AI – seeming bleak, or possibly more grim. (Doesn't it feel like in a proper dystopia, the mind-dulling corporate-sponsored anti-human technology might function more effectively?) Did no one sound the alarm about this?
The answer, at least regarding science fiction films from years ago (or occasionally months ago) set in 2026, is both yes and no. A number of those warnings are universally relevant (worldwide disaster) but in detail far-fetched (if humanity is inevitably ravaged, we will almost certainly bring down the ape population with us). Others of them are prescient; the rest just resemble poor green screen. But it's valuable to explore where various directors, ranging from masters to journeymen, thought we'd be situated by this time in our planet's development. Therefore, we shall examine a selection of the films that have been set in 2026 over the years and determine if they have anything to teach us.
The Game 'Doom'
Well, this doesn't bode well. In the universe of the video game adaptation *Doom*, whose two-decade milestone was noted by virtually no one, 2026 is the year that mankind finds a gateway to an ancient city on Mars, where the people of Earth can establish a research facility. Now, the bad stuff – in terms of plot and in terms of over-the-top film versions of a first-person-shooter video game – does not actually go down for two more decades later, so should we find a portal to Mars now, we might have some time to avert true disaster. If we did discover a portal to an old Martian city, it's truly hard to determine whether Elon Musk would remain super-psyched to send everyone to Mars or would immediately turn disheartened that the discovery wasn't something he personally paid for, allowing him to assert savior-like credit for mankind's journey into the stars. That's before we consider the collection of extraterrestrial genetics and subsequent transformations into monstrous beings. (Once more, this is nearer 2046, not to be confused with the Wong Kar-wai film.) Overall, *Doom* is (if nothing else) a useful example for the reasons we let Mars serve as a long-term hope for humanity. Whether in John Carpenter's cheap-looking space-western *Ghosts of Mars*, the more grounded science fiction of *Red Planet*, or the woo-woo spiritualism of *Mission to Mars*, our distant neighbor planet rarely act as a beacon of optimism. If anyone wants to close that questionable Martian real estate sale, maybe they ought to begin with at least ensuring the fantasy version appear appealing.
The Marvel Dregs
One of the goofiest quirks of the current Marvel Cinematic Universe is the way it handles the multiple world-threatening cataclysms, encompassing a five-year time-jump whose events are mostly undepicted in the movies themselves; the movies have turned into a clock radio perpetually set a few seconds fast – only instead of minutes, it's years. Consequently, there exists a whole bunch of MCU content that fan sites helpfully explain to be taking place in 2026. The good ones, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underrated romp *The Marvels*, take place far away from Earth, and so seem pretty detached from any concrete sense of time. However the bad stuff is some of the worst the studio has ever produced: the nonsensically meandering TV show *Secret Invasion* and the Zoom-call debacle of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Judging by this stuff, we're in for a whole lot of frustrating stagnation in 2026, including the related narrative that actually, this nonsensical crap unfolding before our eyes is crucial to future events. Even worse, in the real world that claim will probably turn out to be accurate.
The Apes Saga Continues
Most of the classic five-movie *Planet of the Apes* cycle is located in the further-flung tomorrow of Earth, but the modern series that started with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* begins nearer the present, starting its timeline approximately 2016. Thus, when a virus that knocks out most of Earth’s human population has run its course, and also boosted the cognitive abilities of primates, it’s only 2026, with further setbacks for mankind (and simian triumphs) ahead. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, depicting how swiftly this virus spreads globally and set in 2019, appears downright eerie in the aftermath of the real-world pandemic that would dawn in 2020. By comparison, the movie *Dawn* looks more abstract; astonishingly, we’re now six years out from the onset of Covid-19, and society, though clearly wounded by the ongoing virus, was not wiped out, and our technology definitely has not been disabled. But this bleakest of the four modern *Apes* movies (to date!) still has a significant downer to offer, implying that the fundamental nature of beings, whatever qualifies as each, will inevitably lead to warfare, regardless of the efforts of the most well-meaning individuals. We’re at the mercy 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, even though we ought to try.
The Silent Classic
By far the best-known 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 wealthy industrialists preside over the skyscrapers as laborers work tirelessly below the surface on the machines that keep everything running. Affluent surface resident Freder, scion of the city’s ruler, has his perspective changed to these massive class divisions when he falls for Maria, an subterranean activist who advocates for a reconciliation of the two halves of Metropolis. A scientist with more radical plans creates a automaton in her image, hoping to tear the whole of Metropolis to ruin. In this narrative, a machine designed to mimic a human isn't a tool of the ruling corporate class, but someone who wants to witness their downfall; it's one element flipped by the modern world in a future that otherwise seems to be progressing. *Metropolis* also envisions a world where advanced machinery relies on old-fashioned manual labor, which appears as a perfect fusion of rightwing disdain for “the working class” and corporate enthusiasm for an tech boom. It hasn't yet come to pass, but it's easy to picture a somewhat less stylish-looking version of Lang’s city expanding out with the prospect of a return to industrial production. The trickier, less plausible feat is the conclusion of the film, where the chasm between the wealthy and the have-nots is spanned with compassion; not so much with specific policies. Like *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie advocates peaceful cohabitation; unlike *Dawn*, it appears hopeful about the possibility
