Fresh Start, Old Warnings: What Can Films Set in 2026 Teach Us?
The year 2025 might sound more futuristic. Maybe it's the sound of the letter "f" in "five". But 2026 signifies a leap forward, a moment where we currently stand, with each futuristic development – chiefly the broad integration of AI – appearing bleak, or perhaps more grim. (It often seems like in a true dystopia, the mind-dulling corporate-backed dehumanizing technology would actually operate a bit better?) Didn't anyone warn us regarding this?
The answer, at least concerning science fiction films made long ago (or occasionally recently) set in 2026, is a mixed bag. Some of these prophecies are broadly applicable (worldwide disaster) but in detail implausible (if humanity is ultimately ravaged, we will almost certainly bring down the primate species with us). Others of them are prescient; others just look like bad visual effects. But it's worth examining where different directors, ranging from masters to grunts, thought we'd be positioned by this time in our planet's development. So let's examine a selection of the movies that have been set in 2026 over the years and determine if they have anything to impart.
The Game 'Doom'
Well, this isn't promising. According to the game-to-film translation *Doom*, whose two-decade milestone was recently celebrated by hardly anyone, 2026 is the year that mankind discovers a gateway to an long-lost metropolis on Mars, where the inhabitants of Earth are able to set up a scientific outpost. Currently, the bad stuff – in terms of plot and concerning over-the-top cinematic imitations of a FPS video game – doesn't really go down for another 20 years later, so should we find 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 genuinely difficult to determine whether a certain tech billionaire would still be super-psyched to send everyone to Mars or would instantly become disheartened that the portal was not a thing he funded himself, enabling him to assert messianic credit for mankind's journey to the cosmos. That's before we consider the collection of extraterrestrial genetics and subsequent mutations into monstrous beings. (Once more, this is closer to 2046, distinct from the acclaimed director's film.) In general, *Doom* is (if nothing else) a useful example for the reasons we allow Mars serve as a long-term aspiration for mankind. Be it in John Carpenter's chintzy space-western *Ghosts of Mars*, the realistic sci-fi of *Red Planet*, or the new-age spiritualism of *Mission to Mars*, our distant neighbor planet doesn't tend to act as a symbol of optimism. Should someone wishes to make that dubious red-planet real estate sale, perhaps they should start with first making the fantasy version look good.
Marvel's Lesser Offerings
A of the strangest features of the present Marvel Cinematic Universe is how to account for the multiple global disasters, encompassing a half-decade leap whose events are mostly undepicted in the films themselves; the movies have turned into a alarm clock constantly running a few seconds fast – only instead of minutes, it's annual increments. Consequently, there exists a whole bunch of Marvel stuff that various wikis 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 distant from Earth, and so seem pretty unmoored from any concrete sense of time. But the bad stuff is some of the worst the studio has ever produced: the convoluted and aimless TV show *Secret Invasion* and the remote-meeting debacle of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Based on these examples, we're facing a great deal of frustrating stagnation in 2026, including the related spin that in truth, this confusing mess unfolding before our eyes is crucial to whatever happens next. More troublingly, in the actual world that assertion will likely prove accurate.
The Apes Saga Continues
Most of the original five-film *Planet of the Apes* cycle is set in the more distant tomorrow of Earth, but the modern series that started with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* begins nearer the present, initiating its timeline around 2016. Thus, when a virus that devastates the majority of Earth’s people has run its course, and simultaneously enhanced the cognitive abilities of primates, it’s only 2026, with additional human indignities (and victories for apes) ahead. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, depicting how rapidly this virus propagates around the world and taking place around 2019, looks profoundly unsettling in the aftermath of the actual global health crisis that would begin in 2020. By comparison, the movie *Dawn* looks less literal; astonishingly, we’re now six years out from the spread of Covid-19, and society, though clearly impacted by the still-spreading virus, hasn't been annihilated, and technological infrastructure definitely has not been disabled. Yet this most pessimistic of the quartet of contemporary *Apes* movies (at least so far!) nonetheless contains a significant bummer to offer, implying that human and/or ape nature, however one defines each, will unavoidably result in warfare, no matter the efforts of the best-intentioned individuals. We’re at the mercy of those who exploit others’ worst instincts, although those instincts don't represent the most. Currently, it feels hard to argue with that, even though we ought to try.
The Silent Classic
By far the best-known portrayal of 2026 in film is from a movie close to celebrating its centennial. The director's silent classic *Metropolis* takes place in a futuristic city where wealthy industrialists lord over the skyscrapers as workers toil below the surface on the equipment that keep everything running. Rich surface resident Freder, son of the city’s ruler, has his perspective changed to these enormous social gaps when he becomes obsessed with Maria, an subterranean activist who preaches a coming together of the two halves of Metropolis. A scientist with darker plans creates a robot in her likeness, aiming to tear the entire Metropolis down in flames. Here, a robot created to imitate a human does not serve as an instrument of the ruling corporate class, but an entity who desires to witness their downfall; it's a component inverted by reality in a future that in other ways seems to be progressing. *Metropolis* also imagines a world where technology relies on old-fashioned manual labor, which appears as a most logical fusion of rightwing disdain for “unskilled workers” and business enthusiasm for an AI bubble. It has not yet come to pass, but it's easy to picture a slightly less stylish-looking iteration of Lang’s city growing with the promise of a resurgence to manufacturing. The trickier, harder-to-imagine accomplishment is the conclusion of the film, where the gap between the haves and the poor is bridged with compassion; not so much with concrete reforms. Similar to *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie advocates peaceful cohabitation; unlike *Dawn*, it appears optimistic about the chance
