New Year, Old Cautionary Tales: What Can Films Placed in 2026 Teach Us?
The date 2025 could appear more futuristic. Perhaps it's the presence of the consonant "f" in "five". But 2026 represents one step beyond, a moment where we currently stand, with each science-fiction-style advancement – primarily the broad integration of artificial intelligence – seeming bleak, or perhaps more grim. (Doesn't it feel like in a proper dystopia, the mind-dulling corporate-sponsored anti-human technology might function more effectively?) Didn't anyone sound the alarm regarding this?
The response, at least regarding our sci-fi movies from years ago (or sometimes months ago) set in 2026, is a mixed bag. A number of these prophecies are broadly applicable (global catastrophe) but in detail far-fetched (when mankind is inevitably ravaged, we will most likely bring down the ape population with us). Others of them are prescient; the rest just resemble bad green screen. But it's worth examining where various directors, ranging from masters to grunts, thought we'd be situated by now in the world's evolution. Therefore, we shall take a look a selection of the films that have been depicted in 2026 throughout cinematic history and see if they have anything to teach us.
The Game 'Doom'
Now, this isn't promising. In the universe of the game-to-film translation *Doom*, whose 20th anniversary was recently celebrated by virtually no one, 2026 is the year that humanity discovers a portal to an long-lost metropolis on Mars, where the inhabitants of Earth can set up a research facility. Currently, the negative events – regarding plot and concerning garish film versions of a first-person-shooter video game – does not actually transpire for another 20 years later, so even if we do discover a portal to Mars now, we could gain some time to avert catastrophe. If we did uncover a passageway to an old Martian city, it's truly hard to tell whether Elon Musk would still be super-psyched to dispatch people to Mars or would instantly become disheartened that the portal wasn't something he personally paid for, allowing him to claim messianic ownership for humanity's journey into the stars. This precedes we consider the collection of extraterrestrial genetics and resulting mutations into horrific creatures. (Once more, this is nearer 2046, not to be confused with the Wong Kar-wai film.) Overall, *Doom* is (if nothing else) a good test case for why, exactly we let Mars serve as a long-term hope for humanity. Whether in the director's cheap-looking space-western *Ghosts of Mars*, the realistic science fiction of *Red Planet*, or the new-age mysticism of *Mission to Mars*, our far-off planet doesn't tend to serve as a beacon of hope. If anyone wishes to close that questionable Martian property deal, maybe they ought to begin with first making the fictional depiction appear appealing.
The Marvel Dregs
A of the strangest features of the current MCU is the way it handles the multiple global cataclysms, encompassing a half-decade leap whose occurrences are mostly undepicted in the films themselves; the movies have become like a alarm clock perpetually set a few minutes fast – only instead of minutes, it's annual increments. Consequently, there exists a whole bunch of MCU content that fan sites clarify to be taking place in 2026. The better entries, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underappreciated adventure *The Marvels*, occur far away from Earth, and so seem pretty unmoored from our sense of time. But the poorer material is among the weakest the studio has ever produced: the nonsensically meandering TV show *Secret Invasion* and the remote-meeting debacle of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Based on this stuff, we're facing a great deal of frustrating wheel-spinning in 2026, including the related narrative that actually, this confusing mess happening in front of us is essential to future events. Even worse, in the real world that claim will probably turn out to be accurate.
The Apes Saga Continues
The majority of the classic five-movie *Planet of the Apes* series is set in the further-flung future of Earth, but the modern series that started with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* begins closer to home, initiating its chronology around 2016. Thus, when a pathogen that devastates the majority of Earth’s human population has done its damage, and simultaneously boosted the cognitive abilities of apes, it’s merely 2026, with additional human indignities (and victories for apes) to come. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, illustrating how swiftly this virus spreads around the world and taking place in 2019, looks downright eerie in the aftermath of the real-world pandemic that would dawn in 2020. By comparison, the movie *Dawn* looks less literal; astonishingly, we’re already half a decade from the spread of Covid-19, and society, though clearly wounded by the still-spreading virus, hasn't been annihilated, and technological infrastructure certainly has not been disabled. But this most pessimistic of the four contemporary *Apes* movies (at least so far!) nonetheless contains a substantial downer in store, implying that the fundamental nature of beings, however one defines each, will unavoidably lead to warfare, no matter the work of the best-intentioned individuals. We’re subject to the whims of those who appeal to others’ worst instincts, even if those instincts don't represent the most. Right now, it feels difficult to argue with that, despite the fact that we probably should.
Metropolis
By far the most prominent depiction of 2026 in film is from a movie nearing celebrating its centennial. The director's iconic silent film *Metropolis* is set in a futuristic city where rich businessmen preside over the towers as laborers toil underground on the machines that power the city. Rich surface resident Freder, son of the city’s master, has his eyes opened to these enormous social gaps when he becomes obsessed with Maria, an subterranean activist who advocates for a coming together of the two halves of Metropolis. A inventor with darker plans creates a automaton in her image, hoping to tear the whole of Metropolis down in flames. Here, a machine created to imitate a human does not serve as an instrument of the ruling corporate class, but someone who wants to witness their downfall; it's one element flipped by reality in a future that otherwise appears to be well on its way. *Metropolis* also imagines a world where technology depends on traditional manual labor, which appears as a most logical union of rightwing disdain for “unskilled workers” and business zeal for an AI bubble. It hasn't yet come to pass, but it's easy to picture a slightly less stylish-looking iteration of Lang’s city expanding out with the prospect of a return to manufacturing. The trickier, harder-to-imagine feat is the conclusion of the film, where the chasm between the haves and the poor is spanned with love; rather than with concrete reforms. Similar to *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie advocates peaceful cohabitation; in contrast to *Dawn*, it seems optimistic about the chance
