Fresh Start, Familiar Warnings: What Can Films Placed in 2026 Teach Us?
The year 2025 could appear increasingly advanced. Maybe it's the presence of the consonant "f" in "five". But 2026 signifies a leap forward, and it's where we currently stand, with each futuristic development – chiefly the widespread adoption of artificial intelligence – appearing bleak, or possibly more grim. (It often seems like in a proper dystopia, the mind-dulling corporate-sponsored anti-human technology would actually operate more effectively?) Did no one warn us regarding this?
The answer, at least regarding science fiction films made long ago (or sometimes recently) set in 2026, is a mixed bag. Some of these prophecies are broadly applicable (worldwide disaster) but specifically far-fetched (if humanity is inevitably decimated, we will most likely bring down the primate species with us). Some of them are prescient; the rest just look like poor visual effects. But it's worth examining where different film-makers, ranging from masters to grunts, thought we'd be situated by now in the world's development. So let's take a look at some 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 doesn't bode well. In the universe of the video game adaptation *Doom*, whose 20th anniversary was noted by virtually no one, 2026 is the year that humanity discovers 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 – in terms of narrative and in terms of garish cinematic imitations of a first-person-shooter video game – does not actually go down for another 20 years in the future, so even if we find a portal to Mars now, we might have a respite to avert catastrophe. Were we to uncover a portal to an ancient Martian city, it's truly hard to tell whether a certain tech billionaire would still be extremely excited to send everyone to Mars or would immediately turn disheartened that the portal wasn't something he personally paid for, enabling him to claim messianic ownership for humanity's expansion into the stars. That's before we even get to the harvesting of extraterrestrial genetics and resulting mutations into monstrous beings. (Again, this is closer to 2046, not to be confused with the Wong Kar-wai film.) Overall, *Doom* is (at the very least) a good test case for why, exactly we allow Mars become a stretch-goal aspiration for mankind. Be it in John Carpenter's cheap-looking genre hybrid *Ghosts of Mars*, the realistic science fiction of *Red Planet*, or the woo-woo mysticism of *Mission to Mars*, our distant neighbor planet rarely serve as a beacon of hope. Should someone wishes to make that dubious red-planet real estate sale, maybe they ought to begin with first ensuring the fantasy version appear appealing.
The Marvel Dregs
A of the strangest features of the present Marvel Cinematic Universe is the way it handles the multiple global cataclysms, including a half-decade leap whose events are largely undepicted in the films themselves; the films have become like a alarm clock constantly running a few seconds fast – only instead of minutes, it's years. So there's a whole bunch of MCU content that various wikis helpfully explain to be taking place in 2026. The good ones, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underappreciated romp *The Marvels*, take place far away from Earth, and so feel pretty unmoored from our sense of time. However the poorer material is among the weakest the studio 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 in for a great deal of frustrating stagnation in 2026, along with the accompanying spin that in truth, this nonsensical crap happening in front of us is essential to whatever happens next. More troublingly, in the actual world that claim will probably prove accurate.
Dawn of the Planet of the Apes
The majority of the classic five-film *Planet of the Apes* cycle is set in the further-flung tomorrow of Earth, but the new trilogy that started with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* starts closer to home, initiating its chronology approximately 2016. So by the time a pathogen that knocks out most of Earth’s human population has run its course, and simultaneously boosted the cognitive abilities of primates, it’s only 2026, with further setbacks for mankind (and simian triumphs) ahead. The post-credits scene of *Rise*, illustrating how rapidly this virus propagates around the world and set in 2019, looks downright eerie in the aftermath of the real-world pandemic 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 obviously impacted by the still-spreading virus, hasn't been wiped out, and technological infrastructure certainly hasn't been disabled. Yet this bleakest of the four contemporary *Apes* movies (to date!) still has a substantial downer in store, suggesting that human and/or ape nature, however one defines either, will inevitably lead to warfare, regardless of the efforts of the best-intentioned individuals. We’re at the mercy of those who exploit others’ worst instincts, although those drives are not held by the majority. Currently, it seems difficult to dispute that, despite the fact that we probably should.
The Silent Classic
By far the best-known portrayal of 2026 in cinema is from a movie close to celebrating its centennial. The director's silent classic *Metropolis* is set in a city of tomorrow where rich businessmen preside over the skyscrapers as workers toil below the surface on the machines that power the city. Affluent city-dweller Freder, son of the city’s master, has his perspective changed to these massive social gaps when he becomes obsessed with Maria, an subterranean organizer who preaches a reconciliation of the separate strata of Metropolis. A scientist with more radical plans builds a robot in her likeness, aiming to bring the whole of Metropolis to ruin. In this narrative, a machine created 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 the modern world in a future that otherwise appears to be well on its way. *Metropolis* also envisions a world where technology relies on traditional human toil, which seems like a perfect union of conservative contempt for “the working class” and corporate enthusiasm for an tech boom. It hasn't yet come to pass, but it's simple to imagine a somewhat less stylish-looking version of Lang’s city expanding out with the prospect of a return 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 love; not so much with concrete reforms. Like *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie advocates coexistence; in contrast to *Dawn*, it seems hopeful about the chance
