New Year, Old Warnings: Lessons from Films Set in 2026 Show Us?
The date 2025 might sound more futuristic. Maybe it's the sound of the letter "f" in "five". However 2026 signifies a leap forward, and it's where we find ourselves, with every futuristic development – chiefly the broad integration of artificial intelligence – seeming dystopian, or possibly even worse. (Doesn't it feel like in a proper dystopia, the brain-numbing corporate-sponsored anti-human technology would actually function a bit better?) Didn't anyone warn us regarding this?
The answer, at least regarding science fiction films from years ago (or occasionally recently) set in 2026, is both yes and no. A number of these prophecies are universally relevant (worldwide disaster) but specifically implausible (when mankind is inevitably decimated, we will almost certainly take the ape population alongside us). Others of them are prescient; the rest just resemble bad visual effects. Yet it remains valuable to explore where different directors, from geniuses to journeymen, believed we'd be positioned by this time in the world's development. So let's examine at some of the movies that have been set in 2026 over the years and determine if they contain any lessons to impart.
Doom
Now, this doesn't bode well. In the universe of the game-to-film translation *Doom*, whose 20th anniversary was noted by hardly anyone, 2026 is the year that mankind finds a portal to an ancient city on Mars, where the inhabitants of Earth are able to establish a scientific outpost. Currently, the negative events – in terms of plot and in terms of over-the-top cinematic imitations of a FPS video game – does not actually transpire for two more decades in the future, so even if we find a Martian gateway now, we might have some time to avert catastrophe. If we did discover a portal to an ancient Martian city, it's truly hard to tell whether Elon Musk would still be extremely excited to dispatch people to Mars or would immediately turn dejected that the portal wasn't something he funded himself, allowing him to assert messianic credit for humanity's journey to the cosmos. This precedes we even get to the collection of extraterrestrial genetics and subsequent mutations into horrific creatures. (Again, this is nearer 2046, not to be confused with the acclaimed director's film.) In general, *Doom* is (if nothing else) a good test case for why, exactly we let Mars become a stretch-goal hope for mankind. Be it in John Carpenter's chintzy space-western *Ghosts of Mars*, the realistic science fiction of *Red Planet*, or the new-age spiritualism of *Mission to Mars*, our distant neighbor planet doesn't tend to act as a beacon of hope. Should someone wishes to close that dubious red-planet property deal, perhaps they should start with at least making the fantasy version look good.
Marvel's Lesser Offerings
A of the goofiest quirks of the present MCU is how to account for the various global disasters, including a five-year time-jump whose events are mostly undepicted in the movies themselves; the movies have turned into a alarm clock perpetually set a few seconds fast – except with minutes, it's years. 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 underrated romp *The Marvels*, take place distant from Earth, and so seem quite detached from our sense of time. But 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 facing a whole lot of frustrating wheel-spinning in 2026, along with the related spin that in truth, this confusing mess unfolding before our eyes is essential to whatever happens next. Even worse, in the actual world that claim will likely turn out to be accurate.
Dawn of the Planet of the Apes
Most of the classic five-film *Planet of the Apes* series is located in the further-flung tomorrow of Earth, but the modern series that began with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* starts closer to home, initiating its timeline around 2016. Thus, when a pathogen that knocks out most of Earth’s people has done its damage, and also enhanced the intelligence of apes, it’s merely 2026, with additional setbacks for mankind (and victories for apes) to come. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, illustrating how rapidly this contagion propagates globally and set in 2019, looks downright eerie in the wake of the real-world pandemic that would dawn in 2020. In contrast, the movie *Dawn* looks more abstract; if you can believe it, we’re now half a decade from the onset of Covid-19, and humanity, though clearly impacted by the still-spreading virus, was not wiped out, and our technology certainly has not been knocked out. Yet this bleakest of the quartet of modern *Apes* movies (to date!) nonetheless contains a substantial bummer in store, suggesting that the fundamental nature of beings, however one defines either, will inevitably result in violent conflict, no matter the efforts of the best-intentioned among us. We’re subject to the whims of those who exploit others’ baser impulses, although those drives don't represent the majority. Right now, it seems difficult to argue with that, even though we ought to try.
The Silent Classic
By far the most prominent portrayal of 2026 in cinema is from a movie nearing celebrating its 100th anniversary. Fritz Lang’s silent classic *Metropolis* is set in a city of tomorrow where rich businessmen preside over the skyscrapers as laborers work tirelessly below the surface on the equipment that keep everything running. Affluent city-dweller Freder, scion of the city’s master, has his eyes opened to these enormous social gaps when he becomes obsessed with Maria, an underground organizer who advocates for a reconciliation of the two halves of Metropolis. A inventor with more radical plans builds a robot in her image, hoping to bring the whole of Metropolis down in flames. Here, a machine designed to mimic a human isn't a tool of the elite, but someone who desires to witness their downfall; it's one element flipped by reality in a vision of tomorrow that in other ways seems to be progressing. *Metropolis* also imagines a world where technology depends on traditional manual labor, which appears as a most logical fusion of conservative contempt for “unskilled workers” and corporate enthusiasm for an tech boom. It has not yet come to pass, but it's simple 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 gap between the wealthy and the have-nots is bridged with compassion; not so much with concrete reforms. Like *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie advocates coexistence; in contrast to *Dawn*, it seems optimistic about the chance
