Fresh Start, Familiar Warnings: Lessons from Films Set in 2026 Teach Us?
The date 2025 might sound more futuristic. Maybe it's the sound of the letter "f" in "five". However 2026 signifies one step beyond, a moment where we find ourselves, with every science-fiction-style advancement – chiefly the broad integration of AI – appearing bleak, or perhaps more grim. (Doesn't it feel like in a proper dystopia, the brain-numbing corporate-sponsored dehumanizing technology might operate more effectively?) Didn't anyone sound the alarm about this?
The response, at least concerning our sci-fi movies made long ago (or occasionally months ago) set in 2026, is both yes and no. 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 with us). Others of them are prescient; the rest just look like bad visual effects. Yet it remains worth examining where different directors, from geniuses to grunts, believed we'd be situated by this time in our planet's evolution. So let's examine a selection of the movies that have been set in 2026 throughout cinematic history and determine if they contain any lessons to teach us.
Doom
Well, this doesn't bode well. In the universe of the game-to-film translation *Doom*, whose two-decade milestone was noted by hardly anyone, 2026 is the year that mankind discovers a portal to an long-lost metropolis on Mars, where the people of Earth are able to establish a research facility. Currently, the bad stuff – in terms of plot and concerning over-the-top film versions of a FPS video game – does not actually transpire for another 20 years in the future, so should we do discover a portal to Mars this year, we could gain some time to avert true disaster. If we did discover a passageway to an old Martian city, it's genuinely difficult to determine whether Elon Musk would remain super-psyched to send everyone to Mars or would instantly become dejected that the portal wasn't something he personally paid for, allowing him to assert savior-like credit for mankind's expansion to the cosmos. This precedes we even get to the harvesting of Martian chromosomes and subsequent mutations into horrific creatures. (Once more, this is nearer 2046, not to be confused with the Wong Kar-wai film.) In general, *Doom* is (at the very least) a good test case for why, exactly we let Mars serve as a stretch-goal aspiration for humanity. Be it in John Carpenter's cheap-looking space-western *Ghosts of Mars*, the realistic sci-fi of *Red Planet*, or the woo-woo mysticism of *Mission to Mars*, our far-off planet rarely act as a beacon of optimism. Should someone wants to make that dubious Martian real estate sale, maybe they ought to begin with first ensuring the fantasy version look good.
The Marvel Dregs
One of the goofiest quirks of the present Marvel Cinematic Universe is the way it handles the multiple global cataclysms, encompassing a half-decade leap whose occurrences are largely undepicted in the movies themselves; the films have turned into a clock radio constantly running a few seconds fast – except with minutes, it's annual increments. So there's 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 underappreciated adventure *The Marvels*, occur far away from Earth, and so seem pretty detached from any concrete sense of time. However the bad stuff is some of the worst Marvel has created: the nonsensically meandering 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 annoying stagnation in 2026, along with the related narrative that in truth, this nonsensical crap unfolding in front of us is crucial to future events. More troublingly, in the real world that claim will probably turn out to be accurate.
The Apes Saga Continues
The majority of the original five-film *Planet of the Apes* cycle 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* begins nearer the present, starting its timeline approximately 2016. Thus, when a pathogen that knocks out the majority of Earth’s people has run its course, and also enhanced the intelligence of primates, it’s merely 2026, with further setbacks for mankind (and simian triumphs) to come. The post-credits scene of *Rise*, illustrating how rapidly this contagion spreads globally and set in 2019, looks downright eerie in the aftermath of the real-world pandemic that would begin in 2020. By comparison, the movie *Dawn* looks less literal; if you can believe it, we’re already six years out from the onset of Covid-19, and humanity, though obviously wounded by the ongoing virus, was not wiped out, and technological infrastructure certainly has not been disabled. Yet this bleakest of the quartet of contemporary *Apes* movies (at least so far!) nonetheless contains a significant bummer to offer, suggesting that human and/or ape nature, whatever qualifies as either, will unavoidably lead to violent conflict, regardless of the efforts of the most well-meaning individuals. We’re subject to the whims of those who appeal to others’ baser impulses, although those instincts are not held by the majority. Currently, it seems difficult to dispute that, despite the fact that we probably should.
The Silent Classic
Easily the most prominent depiction of 2026 in cinema is from a movie close to celebrating its centennial. Fritz Lang’s iconic silent film *Metropolis* takes place in a futuristic city where wealthy industrialists preside over the skyscrapers as workers toil below the surface on the equipment that power the city. Rich city-dweller Freder, son of the city’s ruler, has his perspective changed to these enormous social gaps when he falls for Maria, an underground activist who preaches a coming together of the two halves of Metropolis. A scientist with more radical plans creates a robot in her likeness, aiming to tear the whole of Metropolis to ruin. In this narrative, a robot created to imitate a human isn't a tool of the elite, but an entity who wants to see them destroyed; it's a component inverted by the modern world in a future that in other ways seems to be progressing. *Metropolis* also envisions a world where technology relies on old-fashioned human toil, which seems like a perfect union of conservative contempt for “the working class” and business zeal 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 expanding out with the prospect of a return to industrial production. The trickier, harder-to-imagine accomplishment is the conclusion of the film, where the chasm between the wealthy and the poor is spanned with love; not so much with concrete reforms. Similar to *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie advocates peaceful cohabitation; unlike *Dawn*, it seems hopeful about the possibility
