Fresh Start, Old Warnings: Lessons from Films Set in 2026 Teach Us?
The date 2025 might sound increasingly advanced. Perhaps it's the presence of the letter "f" in "five". However 2026 represents a leap forward, and it's where we currently stand, with each futuristic advancement – primarily the widespread adoption of artificial intelligence – seeming bleak, or possibly more grim. (It often seems like in a true dystopia, the brain-numbing corporate-backed anti-human technology might function more effectively?) Did no one warn us about this?
The response, particularly concerning our sci-fi movies from years ago (or sometimes recently) set in 2026, is a mixed bag. Some of those warnings are universally relevant (global catastrophe) but specifically far-fetched (when mankind is inevitably decimated, we will most likely bring down the ape population alongside us). Some of them are prescient; the rest just resemble bad green screen. But it's valuable to explore where different directors, ranging from masters to grunts, believed we'd be positioned by this time in the world's development. So let's take a look a selection of the movies that have been set in 2026 throughout cinematic history and see if they have anything to teach us.
Doom
Well, this isn't promising. According to the game-to-film translation *Doom*, whose 20th anniversary was recently celebrated by hardly anyone, 2026 is the year that mankind finds a gateway to an ancient city on Mars, where the inhabitants of Earth are able to set up a scientific outpost. Now, the negative events – in terms of plot and concerning over-the-top film versions of a FPS video game – does not actually go down for another 20 years later, so should we do discover a Martian gateway this year, we could gain a respite to avert catastrophe. Were we to uncover a passageway to an ancient Martian city, it's genuinely difficult to tell whether a certain tech billionaire would remain super-psyched to send everyone to Mars or would instantly become disheartened that the portal was not a thing he personally paid for, allowing him to claim messianic credit for mankind's expansion into the stars. This precedes we even get to the collection of Martian chromosomes and resulting mutations into horrific creatures. (Once more, this is nearer 2046, not to be confused with the acclaimed director's film.) Overall, *Doom* is (at the very least) a good test case for the reasons we allow Mars serve as a stretch-goal aspiration for mankind. Be it in John Carpenter's chintzy genre hybrid *Ghosts of Mars*, the realistic science fiction of *Red Planet*, or the woo-woo spiritualism of *Mission to Mars*, our distant neighbor planet rarely serve as a beacon of hope. If anyone wants to close that questionable Martian real estate sale, perhaps they ought to begin with first making the fictional depiction appear appealing.
Marvel's Lesser Offerings
A of the strangest features of the current MCU is how to account for the multiple world-threatening cataclysms, encompassing a five-year time-jump whose occurrences are mostly undepicted in the films themselves; the films have become like a clock radio constantly set a few seconds fast – only instead of minutes, it's annual increments. Consequently, there exists a large assortment of Marvel stuff that fan sites clarify to be set in 2026. The good ones, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underrated romp *The Marvels*, occur far away from Earth, and so feel quite unmoored from our sense of time. But the poorer material is some of the worst Marvel has created: the nonsensically meandering TV show *Secret Invasion* and the remote-meeting debacle of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Judging by these examples, we're in for a great deal of annoying wheel-spinning in 2026, including the accompanying narrative that in truth, this nonsensical crap unfolding in front of us is essential to future events. More troublingly, in the actual world that assertion will probably prove 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 tomorrow of Earth, but the new trilogy that began with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* begins nearer the present, initiating its timeline approximately 2016. So by the time a pathogen that devastates the majority of Earth’s human population has run its course, and also boosted the intelligence of apes, it’s only 2026, with further setbacks for mankind (and victories for apes) ahead. The post-credits scene of *Rise*, illustrating how swiftly this contagion propagates globally and taking place around 2019, looks downright eerie in the wake of the actual pandemic that would dawn in 2020. In contrast, the movie *Dawn* seems 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 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 (to date!) still has a significant downer in store, implying that the fundamental nature of beings, however one defines either, will unavoidably result in violent conflict, regardless of the work of the best-intentioned individuals. We’re subject to the whims of those who exploit others’ baser impulses, although those instincts don't represent the majority. Currently, it feels difficult to dispute that, even though we ought to try.
The Silent Classic
Easily the best-known depiction of 2026 in film is from a movie nearing celebrating its 100th anniversary. Fritz Lang’s iconic silent film *Metropolis* is set in a city of tomorrow where rich businessmen preside over the skyscrapers as workers work tirelessly underground on the equipment that power the city. Affluent city-dweller Freder, scion of the city’s ruler, has his eyes opened to these massive social gaps when he falls for Maria, an subterranean activist who preaches a coming together of the two halves of Metropolis. A scientist with darker plans creates a robot in her image, hoping to tear the entire Metropolis down in flames. Here, a machine created to mimic 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 otherwise seems to be well on its way. *Metropolis* also envisions a world where technology depends on old-fashioned manual labor, which seems like a perfect fusion of conservative disdain for “unskilled workers” and business zeal for an AI bubble. It has not yet come to pass, but it's easy to picture a somewhat less stylish-looking version of Lang’s city expanding out with the prospect of a return to industrial production. The more complex, less plausible feat is the conclusion of the film, where the gap between the wealthy and the have-nots is bridged with love; not so much with concrete reforms. Similar to *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie pleads for coexistence; in contrast to *Dawn*, it seems optimistic about the chance
