New Year, Old Warnings: What Can Films Placed in 2026 Teach Us?
The date 2025 could appear increasingly advanced. Perhaps it's the sound of the consonant "f" in "five". But 2026 signifies one step beyond, a moment where we currently stand, with every science-fiction-style advancement – chiefly the widespread adoption of AI – appearing bleak, or perhaps even worse. (Doesn't it feel like in a proper dystopia, the mind-dulling corporate-sponsored anti-human technology might operate a bit better?) Didn't anyone warn us regarding this?
The response, at least regarding our sci-fi movies from years ago (or sometimes months ago) positioned in 2026, is a mixed bag. A number of those warnings are universally relevant (worldwide disaster) but in detail implausible (when mankind is inevitably decimated, we will most likely bring down the primate species alongside us). Others of them are prescient; the rest just resemble poor green screen. But it's valuable to explore where various directors, from geniuses to journeymen, thought we'd be situated 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 contain any lessons to teach us.
The Game 'Doom'
Now, this isn't promising. In the universe of the game-to-film translation *Doom*, whose two-decade milestone was recently celebrated by hardly anyone, 2026 is the year that mankind discovers a portal to an ancient city on Mars, where the inhabitants of Earth are able to set up a scientific outpost. Currently, the negative events – in terms of plot and concerning garish cinematic imitations of a first-person-shooter video game – doesn't really go down for two more decades in the future, so even if we find a Martian gateway this year, we might have a respite to avoid true disaster. If we did discover a passageway to an ancient Martian city, it's genuinely difficult to determine whether a certain tech billionaire would remain super-psyched to send everyone to Mars or would immediately turn dejected that the portal was not a thing he personally paid for, enabling him to assert messianic credit for mankind's expansion to the cosmos. That's before we even get to the collection of extraterrestrial genetics and resulting transformations into monstrous beings. (Again, 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 the reasons we allow Mars serve as a stretch-goal hope for mankind. Be it in the director's chintzy 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 doesn't tend to act as a symbol of hope. If anyone wishes to make that dubious red-planet property deal, maybe they ought to begin with at least making the fictional depiction look good.
Marvel's Lesser Offerings
One of the goofiest quirks of the present MCU is how to account for the various global cataclysms, including a half-decade leap whose events are largely undepicted in the films themselves; the movies have become like a clock radio constantly set a few minutes fast – only instead of minutes, it's annual increments. Consequently, there exists a whole bunch of Marvel stuff that fan sites helpfully explain to be set in 2026. The good ones, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underappreciated adventure *The Marvels*, take place far away from Earth, and so seem quite detached from our sense of time. But the bad stuff is among the weakest Marvel has created: the convoluted and aimless TV show *Secret Invasion* and the Zoom-call farce of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Based on these examples, we're facing a great deal of annoying wheel-spinning in 2026, including the related narrative that in truth, this nonsensical crap happening in front of us is essential to future events. Even worse, in the actual world that assertion will likely turn out to be correct.
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* starts nearer the present, starting its timeline around 2016. So by the time a virus 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 additional human indignities (and victories for apes) ahead. The post-credits scene of *Rise*, illustrating how rapidly this virus propagates around the world and taking place around 2019, looks profoundly unsettling in the wake of the real-world pandemic that would dawn in 2020. In contrast, the movie *Dawn* looks less literal; if you can believe it, we’re now half a decade from the spread of Covid-19, and society, though clearly wounded by the still-spreading virus, hasn't been wiped out, and our technology certainly has not been knocked out. But this bleakest of the four modern *Apes* movies (at least so far!) still has a substantial bummer to offer, implying that the fundamental nature of beings, however one defines either, will unavoidably lead to violent conflict, no matter the efforts of the best-intentioned among us. We’re at the mercy of those who exploit others’ worst instincts, even if those drives don't represent the most. Right now, it seems difficult to argue with that, despite the fact that we probably should.
The Silent Classic
By far the best-known depiction of 2026 in film is from a movie close to marking its centennial. The director's iconic silent film *Metropolis* is set in a city of tomorrow where wealthy industrialists preside over the towers as laborers toil below the surface on the machines that keep everything running. Rich surface resident Freder, scion of the city’s master, has his eyes opened to these massive class divisions when he becomes obsessed with Maria, an subterranean activist who preaches a coming together of the separate strata of Metropolis. A inventor with darker plans creates a automaton in her likeness, hoping to tear the whole of Metropolis down in flames. Here, a robot created to imitate a human does not serve as an instrument of the elite, but an entity who wants to see them destroyed; it's one element flipped by the modern world in a future that in other ways seems to be progressing. *Metropolis* also imagines a world where technology relies on traditional manual labor, which appears as a perfect fusion of conservative contempt for “unskilled workers” and corporate enthusiasm for an tech boom. It has not yet come to pass, but it's easy to picture a somewhat more utilitarian iteration of Lang’s city expanding out with the promise of a return to industrial production. The more complex, harder-to-imagine accomplishment is the ending of the film, where the gap between the haves and the poor is spanned with love; not so much with specific policies. Similar to *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie advocates peaceful cohabitation; unlike *Dawn*, it seems optimistic about the chance
