New Year, Old Warnings: Lessons from Films Set in 2026 Teach Us?
The year 2025 could appear increasingly advanced. Perhaps it's the presence of the letter "f" in "five". But 2026 represents one step beyond, and it's where we currently stand, with every science-fiction-style development – primarily the broad integration of artificial intelligence – appearing dystopian, or perhaps even worse. (Doesn't it feel like in a true dystopia, the mind-dulling corporate-backed anti-human technology might function more effectively?) Did no one warn us about this?
The response, at least concerning our sci-fi movies made long ago (or occasionally recently) set in 2026, is a mixed bag. Some of those warnings are universally relevant (global catastrophe) but in detail far-fetched (when mankind is ultimately decimated, we will almost certainly bring down the ape population with us). Some of them are prescient; the rest just look like poor green screen. But it's valuable to explore where various film-makers, ranging from masters to journeymen, believed we'd be positioned by now in the world's evolution. Therefore, we shall take a look a selection of the movies that have been set in 2026 over the years and see if they have anything to impart.
Doom
Well, this isn't promising. In the universe of the video game adaptation *Doom*, whose two-decade milestone was noted by hardly anyone, 2026 is the year that mankind discovers a gateway to an ancient city on Mars, where the people of Earth can set up a research facility. Currently, the bad stuff – in terms of plot and in terms of garish cinematic imitations of a first-person-shooter video game – doesn't really transpire for another 20 years later, so even if we do discover a Martian gateway this year, we could gain a respite to avoid catastrophe. If we did uncover a passageway to an ancient Martian city, it's genuinely difficult to determine whether a certain tech billionaire would still be super-psyched to send everyone to Mars or would immediately turn dejected that the portal wasn't something he funded himself, allowing him to assert savior-like credit for humanity's journey into the stars. That's before we consider the harvesting of Martian chromosomes and subsequent transformations into monstrous beings. (Again, this is closer to 2046, distinct from the acclaimed director's film.) Overall, *Doom* is (if nothing else) a good test case for the reasons we let Mars serve as a long-term hope for humanity. Whether in the director's chintzy space-western *Ghosts of Mars*, the realistic science fiction of *Red Planet*, or the woo-woo spiritualism of *Mission to Mars*, our far-off planet rarely serve as a symbol of hope. If anyone wishes to make that dubious red-planet real estate sale, maybe they should start with at least making the fantasy version appear appealing.
Marvel's Lesser Offerings
One of the strangest features of the present Marvel Cinematic Universe is the way it handles the various world-threatening disasters, encompassing a five-year time-jump whose events are largely undepicted in the movies themselves; the films have become like a alarm clock perpetually running a few minutes fast – only instead of minutes, it's annual increments. So there's a whole bunch of MCU content that various wikis helpfully explain to be taking place in 2026. The better entries, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underappreciated romp *The Marvels*, occur distant from Earth, and so seem quite detached from our sense of time. But the poorer material is among the weakest Marvel has created: the convoluted and aimless TV show *Secret Invasion* and the remote-meeting farce of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Based on this stuff, we're facing a whole lot of annoying stagnation in 2026, including the related narrative that actually, this confusing mess unfolding before our eyes is essential to future events. Even worse, in the actual world that claim will probably prove correct.
Dawn of the Planet of the Apes
Most of the original 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* starts nearer the present, initiating its timeline approximately 2016. So by the time a virus that knocks out most of Earth’s people has done its damage, and simultaneously enhanced the intelligence of primates, it’s only 2026, with further setbacks for mankind (and victories for apes) to come. The post-credits scene of *Rise*, depicting how rapidly this contagion propagates globally and set around 2019, looks profoundly unsettling in the wake of the actual global health crisis that would begin in 2020. In contrast, the movie *Dawn* looks less literal; if you can believe it, we’re now six years out from the spread of Covid-19, and society, though clearly wounded by the still-spreading virus, was not wiped out, and technological infrastructure definitely hasn't been disabled. But this most pessimistic of the quartet of modern *Apes* movies (to date!) still has a significant bummer in store, implying that the fundamental nature of beings, whatever qualifies as either, will unavoidably result in violent conflict, regardless of the efforts of the most well-meaning individuals. We’re at the mercy of those who exploit others’ baser impulses, even if those instincts don't represent the majority. Currently, it seems difficult to dispute that, even though we ought to try.
Metropolis
By far the most prominent depiction of 2026 in cinema is from a movie close to marking its 100th anniversary. Fritz Lang’s iconic silent film *Metropolis* takes place in a futuristic city where wealthy industrialists preside over the skyscrapers as workers work tirelessly below the surface on the machines that power the city. Affluent surface resident Freder, son of the city’s master, has his perspective changed to these massive social gaps when he becomes obsessed with Maria, an underground organizer who advocates for a coming together of the two halves of Metropolis. A inventor with darker plans builds a robot in her image, aiming to bring the whole of Metropolis to ruin. Here, a machine designed to mimic a human isn't a tool of the elite, but an entity who wants to see them destroyed; it's a component inverted by the modern world 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 human toil, which appears as a perfect fusion of conservative disdain for “the working class” and corporate zeal for an AI bubble. It hasn't yet materialized, but it's simple to imagine a slightly more utilitarian version of Lang’s city growing with the prospect of a return to manufacturing. The more complex, less plausible feat is the ending of the film, where the chasm between the wealthy and the have-nots is spanned with compassion; rather than with specific policies. Similar to *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie advocates peaceful cohabitation; unlike *Dawn*, it appears hopeful about the possibility
