Fresh Start, Old Cautionary Tales: Lessons from Films Set in 2026 Teach Us?
The year 2025 might sound increasingly advanced. Maybe it's the sound of the consonant "f" in "five". But 2026 represents a leap forward, a moment where we currently stand, with each futuristic advancement – primarily the widespread adoption of AI – appearing dystopian, or perhaps more grim. (Doesn't it feel like in a true dystopia, the brain-numbing corporate-backed dehumanizing technology would actually operate more effectively?) Didn't anyone sound the alarm regarding this?
The answer, particularly concerning our sci-fi movies made long ago (or sometimes recently) set in 2026, is both yes and no. Some of these prophecies are universally relevant (worldwide disaster) but in detail far-fetched (if humanity is inevitably decimated, we will almost certainly bring down the primate species with us). Others of them are visionary; the rest just resemble poor green screen. Yet it remains worth examining where various film-makers, ranging from masters to grunts, believed we'd be positioned by now in our planet's development. So let's examine a selection of the movies that have been set in 2026 throughout cinematic history and determine if they have anything to teach us.
The Game 'Doom'
Well, this isn't promising. In the universe of the video game adaptation *Doom*, whose 20th anniversary was noted by hardly anyone, 2026 is the year that mankind finds a gateway to an ancient city on Mars, where the people of Earth are able to set up a research facility. Currently, the negative events – regarding narrative and concerning garish film versions of a first-person-shooter video game – doesn't really go down for another 20 years in the future, so even if we find a portal to Mars this year, we might have some time to avoid true disaster. Were we to discover a portal to an old Martian city, it's genuinely difficult to determine whether Elon Musk would still be extremely excited to dispatch people to Mars or would instantly become dejected that the portal was not a thing he funded himself, allowing him to claim messianic ownership for humanity's journey into the stars. This precedes we consider the collection of Martian chromosomes and subsequent mutations into monstrous beings. (Once more, this is closer to 2046, not to be confused with the acclaimed director's film.) Overall, *Doom* is (if nothing else) a useful example for the reasons we let Mars become a stretch-goal hope for mankind. Be it in John Carpenter's cheap-looking genre hybrid *Ghosts of Mars*, the more grounded science fiction of *Red Planet*, or the new-age mysticism of *Mission to Mars*, our far-off planet doesn't tend to act as a beacon of optimism. If anyone wants to make that dubious Martian property deal, perhaps they should start with at least ensuring the fantasy version look good.
Marvel's Lesser Offerings
One of the strangest features of the current MCU is how to account for the multiple world-threatening disasters, encompassing a five-year time-jump whose occurrences are largely undepicted in the movies themselves; the movies have become like a clock radio constantly set a few minutes fast – only instead of minutes, it's years. Consequently, there exists a whole bunch of MCU content that fan sites clarify to be set in 2026. The better entries, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underappreciated adventure *The Marvels*, take place far away from Earth, and so feel pretty detached from any concrete sense of time. However the poorer material is among the weakest Marvel has created: the convoluted and aimless TV show *Secret Invasion* and the remote-meeting farce of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Based on this stuff, we're in for a great deal of annoying wheel-spinning in 2026, along with the accompanying narrative that in truth, this nonsensical crap happening in front of us 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
Most of the classic five-movie *Planet of the Apes* series is located in the more distant future of Earth, but the new trilogy that began with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* starts nearer the present, initiating its chronology approximately 2016. Thus, when a virus that devastates most of Earth’s human population has done its damage, and also boosted the cognitive abilities of primates, it’s merely 2026, with further human indignities (and victories for apes) to come. The post-credits scene of *Rise*, depicting how swiftly this contagion propagates around the world and taking place in 2019, looks profoundly unsettling in the aftermath of the real-world pandemic that would begin in 2020. In contrast, the movie *Dawn* looks less literal; astonishingly, we’re now six years out from the spread of Covid-19, and humanity, though obviously wounded by the still-spreading virus, hasn't been annihilated, and technological infrastructure certainly has not been disabled. Yet this most pessimistic of the quartet of contemporary *Apes* movies (at least so far!) still has a significant downer in store, implying that the fundamental nature of beings, whatever qualifies as each, will inevitably lead to violent conflict, no matter the work of the most well-meaning individuals. We’re subject to the whims of those who appeal to others’ worst instincts, even if those instincts are not held by the majority. Right now, it seems difficult to argue with that, despite the fact that we ought to try.
Metropolis
Easily the best-known portrayal of 2026 in cinema is from a movie close to celebrating its centennial. The director's iconic silent film *Metropolis* takes place in a city of tomorrow where rich businessmen lord over the towers as workers toil below the surface on the equipment that keep everything running. Affluent surface resident Freder, son of the city’s master, has his perspective changed to these massive social gaps when he falls for Maria, an subterranean activist who preaches a coming together of the separate strata of Metropolis. A scientist with darker plans builds a robot in her likeness, hoping to tear the whole of Metropolis down in flames. 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 witness their downfall; it's one element inverted by reality in a future that otherwise seems to be well on its way. *Metropolis* also envisions a world where advanced machinery depends on traditional manual labor, which appears as a most logical fusion of conservative disdain for “unskilled workers” and business zeal for an AI bubble. It hasn't yet materialized, but it's easy to imagine a slightly more utilitarian iteration of Lang’s city expanding out with the promise of a resurgence 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 spanned with love; not so much with concrete reforms. Similar to *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie pleads for peaceful cohabitation; unlike *Dawn*, it seems hopeful about the possibility
