New Year, Old Cautionary Tales: What Can Films Set in 2026 Show Us?
The year 2025 could appear increasingly advanced. Perhaps it's the presence of the letter "f" in "five". But 2026 represents one step beyond, a moment where we currently stand, with every science-fiction-style development – chiefly the broad integration of AI – seeming dystopian, or perhaps even worse. (Doesn't it feel like in a true dystopia, the brain-numbing corporate-backed anti-human technology would actually function more effectively?) Did no one warn us regarding this?
The answer, particularly regarding science fiction films made long ago (or occasionally months ago) set in 2026, is both yes and no. A number of these prophecies are universally relevant (global catastrophe) but in detail implausible (when mankind is inevitably ravaged, we will most likely bring down the primate species with us). Others of them are prescient; others just look like bad visual effects. Yet it remains valuable to explore where different directors, ranging from masters to grunts, believed we'd be positioned by now in our planet's evolution. So let's examine a selection of the films that have been depicted in 2026 over the years and see if they have anything to impart.
Doom
Well, this isn't promising. In the universe of the video game adaptation *Doom*, whose 20th anniversary was noted by virtually no one, 2026 is the year that humanity finds a gateway to an long-lost metropolis on Mars, where the inhabitants of Earth can establish a scientific outpost. Now, the negative events – in terms of plot and concerning over-the-top film versions of a first-person-shooter video game – doesn't really transpire for another 20 years in the future, so even if we do discover a portal to Mars this year, we might have some time to avert catastrophe. If we did discover a portal to an ancient Martian city, it's genuinely difficult to determine whether Elon Musk would still be extremely excited to send everyone to Mars or would immediately turn disheartened that the portal was not a thing he funded himself, enabling him to claim messianic ownership for mankind's journey into the stars. That's before we even get to the collection of extraterrestrial genetics and resulting transformations into monstrous beings. (Once more, this is closer to 2046, distinct from the Wong Kar-wai film.) Overall, *Doom* is (at the very least) a useful example for the reasons we allow Mars serve as a stretch-goal aspiration for humanity. Be it in the director's chintzy genre hybrid *Ghosts of Mars*, the realistic science fiction of *Red Planet*, or the new-age mysticism of *Mission to Mars*, our far-off planet rarely serve as a beacon of optimism. If anyone wants to close that dubious Martian property deal, maybe they ought to begin with at least ensuring the fantasy version look good.
Marvel's Lesser Offerings
One of the goofiest quirks of the current MCU is the way it handles the various world-threatening disasters, including a five-year time-jump whose occurrences are mostly undepicted in the films themselves; the movies have become like a clock radio perpetually set a few minutes fast – except with minutes, it's annual increments. Consequently, there exists a whole bunch of MCU content that fan sites helpfully explain to be set 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 quite detached from any concrete sense of time. However the poorer material is some of the worst the studio has ever produced: the convoluted and aimless TV show *Secret Invasion* and the Zoom-call farce of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Judging by these examples, we're facing a whole lot of frustrating wheel-spinning in 2026, including the accompanying narrative that actually, this nonsensical crap unfolding before our eyes is crucial to whatever happens next. Even worse, in the actual world that assertion will likely turn out to be correct.
Dawn of the Planet of the Apes
The majority of the original five-film *Planet of the Apes* series 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* begins closer to home, initiating its chronology approximately 2016. So by the time a pathogen that knocks out most of Earth’s people has done its damage, and also enhanced the cognitive abilities of primates, it’s only 2026, with additional setbacks for mankind (and victories for apes) to come. The post-credits scene of *Rise*, illustrating how swiftly this contagion spreads around the world and set around 2019, appears profoundly unsettling in the wake of the real-world pandemic that would dawn in 2020. By comparison, the movie *Dawn* seems more abstract; astonishingly, we’re already half a decade from the onset of Covid-19, and humanity, though clearly wounded by the ongoing virus, hasn't been wiped out, and our technology definitely has not been knocked out. But this bleakest of the four modern *Apes* movies (to date!) nonetheless contains a substantial downer in store, implying that the fundamental nature of beings, whatever qualifies as either, will unavoidably result in warfare, regardless of the efforts of the best-intentioned individuals. We’re at the mercy of those who exploit others’ baser impulses, even if those instincts are not held by the majority. Right now, it seems hard to argue with that, despite the fact that we ought to try.
The Silent Classic
By far the best-known depiction of 2026 in cinema is from a movie close to celebrating its 100th anniversary. Fritz Lang’s iconic silent film *Metropolis* takes place in a futuristic city where wealthy industrialists preside over the towers as laborers work tirelessly below the surface on the machines that power the city. Affluent city-dweller Freder, son of the city’s ruler, has his eyes opened to these massive class divisions when he falls for Maria, an subterranean activist who advocates for a reconciliation of the separate strata of Metropolis. A scientist with more radical plans creates a automaton in her image, aiming to tear the entire Metropolis to ruin. Here, a robot designed to imitate a human does not serve as an instrument of the ruling corporate class, but an entity who wants to see them destroyed; it's a component flipped by reality in a vision of tomorrow that otherwise appears to be well on its way. *Metropolis* also imagines a world where advanced machinery depends on old-fashioned human toil, which appears as a perfect fusion of conservative disdain for “the working class” and corporate zeal for an tech boom. It hasn't yet materialized, but it's simple to picture a somewhat more utilitarian version of Lang’s city growing with the prospect of a return to manufacturing. The trickier, harder-to-imagine feat is the conclusion of the film, where the gap between the wealthy and the have-nots is bridged with compassion; not so much with concrete reforms. Similar to *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie advocates coexistence; unlike *Dawn*, it appears optimistic about the chance
