New Year, Old Warnings: What Can Films Placed in 2026 Teach Us?
The date 2025 could appear more futuristic. Maybe it's the presence of the consonant "f" in "five". But 2026 represents a leap forward, and it's where we currently stand, with every futuristic development – chiefly the widespread adoption of artificial intelligence – seeming bleak, or perhaps even worse. (Doesn't it feel like in a true dystopia, the mind-dulling corporate-sponsored anti-human technology might function more effectively?) Did no one warn us regarding this?
The answer, at least concerning science fiction films made long ago (or occasionally recently) positioned in 2026, is a mixed bag. A number of those warnings are universally relevant (global catastrophe) but specifically implausible (when mankind is inevitably decimated, we will most likely take the ape population with us). Some of them are visionary; the rest just look like poor visual effects. Yet it remains worth examining where different film-makers, from geniuses to grunts, believed we'd be positioned by this time in our planet's development. Therefore, we shall examine 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'
Well, this doesn't bode well. In the universe of the game-to-film translation *Doom*, whose two-decade milestone was noted by hardly anyone, 2026 is the year that mankind finds a portal to an long-lost metropolis on Mars, where the people of Earth are able to establish a research facility. Currently, the negative events – in terms of narrative and in terms of garish cinematic imitations of a first-person-shooter video game – does not actually transpire for two more decades later, so even if we do discover a Martian gateway this year, we might have a respite to avoid catastrophe. Were we to discover a portal to an old Martian city, it's truly hard to determine whether a certain tech billionaire would remain extremely excited to dispatch people to Mars or would immediately turn dejected that the portal was not a thing he funded himself, enabling him to claim savior-like ownership for mankind's expansion to the cosmos. That's before we even get to the collection of Martian chromosomes and resulting transformations into horrific creatures. (Once more, this is closer to 2046, distinct from the Wong Kar-wai film.) In general, *Doom* is (if nothing else) a useful example for the reasons we let Mars serve as a stretch-goal aspiration for mankind. Be it in the director's cheap-looking space-western *Ghosts of Mars*, the more grounded sci-fi of *Red Planet*, or the new-age spiritualism of *Mission to Mars*, our far-off planet doesn't tend to serve as a symbol of optimism. Should someone wishes to close that questionable red-planet real estate sale, maybe they should start with at least making the fictional depiction look good.
The Marvel Dregs
One of the goofiest quirks of the current Marvel Cinematic Universe is the way it handles the various global disasters, encompassing a half-decade leap whose occurrences are largely undepicted in the films themselves; the movies have turned into a clock radio perpetually running a few minutes fast – except with minutes, it's years. Consequently, there exists a large assortment of Marvel stuff that various wikis clarify to be set in 2026. The better entries, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underappreciated romp *The Marvels*, take place distant from Earth, and so feel pretty unmoored from our sense of time. However the poorer material is some of the worst Marvel has created: the convoluted and aimless TV show *Secret Invasion* and the remote-meeting debacle of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Judging by this stuff, we're in for a great deal of annoying stagnation in 2026, including the accompanying narrative that actually, this confusing mess unfolding in front of us is crucial to future events. More troublingly, in the actual world that assertion will probably prove accurate.
The Apes Saga Continues
Most of the original five-movie *Planet of the Apes* cycle is set in the further-flung tomorrow of Earth, but the modern series that started with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* begins closer to home, initiating its timeline approximately 2016. Thus, when a virus that knocks out the majority of Earth’s people has done its damage, and simultaneously boosted the intelligence of primates, it’s only 2026, with further human indignities (and victories for apes) to come. The post-credits scene of *Rise*, depicting how swiftly this contagion propagates globally and set around 2019, appears profoundly unsettling in the aftermath of the actual global health crisis that would dawn in 2020. By comparison, the movie *Dawn* looks less literal; astonishingly, we’re already half a decade from the onset of Covid-19, and society, though obviously wounded by the still-spreading virus, hasn't been annihilated, and our technology certainly hasn't been disabled. But this most pessimistic of the quartet of contemporary *Apes* movies (to date!) still has a substantial bummer to offer, suggesting that human and/or ape nature, whatever qualifies as either, will inevitably result in warfare, no matter the efforts of the most well-meaning individuals. We’re at the mercy of those who appeal to others’ baser impulses, although those instincts don't represent the majority. Currently, it seems hard to dispute that, even though we probably should.
The Silent Classic
Easily the most prominent depiction of 2026 in film is from a movie close to celebrating its 100th anniversary. Fritz Lang’s silent classic *Metropolis* is set in a futuristic city where wealthy industrialists lord over the towers as workers work tirelessly underground on the equipment that keep everything running. Rich city-dweller Freder, son of the city’s ruler, has his perspective changed to these enormous social gaps when he falls for Maria, an underground activist who preaches a reconciliation of the two halves of Metropolis. A scientist with more radical plans builds a robot in her likeness, hoping to tear the whole of Metropolis to ruin. Here, a robot created to imitate a human does not serve as an instrument of the elite, but someone who desires to see them destroyed; it's one element inverted by the modern world in a vision of tomorrow that otherwise seems to be well on its way. *Metropolis* also imagines a world where technology depends on old-fashioned manual labor, which appears as a perfect fusion of rightwing disdain for “the working class” and business enthusiasm for an tech boom. It has not yet come to pass, but it's easy to imagine a somewhat more utilitarian version of Lang’s city growing with the prospect of a return to industrial production. The more complex, less plausible accomplishment is the ending of the film, where the chasm between the haves and the poor is spanned with compassion; rather than with specific policies. Like *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie advocates peaceful cohabitation; unlike *Dawn*, it appears optimistic about the chance
