Fresh Start, Familiar Cautionary Tales: Lessons from Films Set in 2026 Show Us?

The year 2025 could appear increasingly advanced. Perhaps it's the presence of the letter "f" in "five". However 2026 signifies a leap forward, a moment where we currently stand, with every science-fiction-style development – chiefly the widespread adoption of artificial intelligence – appearing bleak, or possibly more grim. (It often seems like in a true dystopia, the mind-dulling corporate-backed dehumanizing technology would actually function a bit better?) Didn't anyone sound the alarm about this?

The answer, particularly concerning our sci-fi movies from years ago (or occasionally months ago) positioned in 2026, is a mixed bag. Some of these prophecies are broadly applicable (worldwide disaster) but in detail implausible (when mankind is inevitably ravaged, we will almost certainly take the ape population alongside us). Others of them are visionary; others just resemble bad green screen. But it's worth examining where various film-makers, from geniuses to grunts, believed we'd be situated by this time in our planet's evolution. Therefore, we shall take a look a selection of the films that have been set in 2026 throughout cinematic history and see if they contain any lessons to impart.

Doom

Well, this doesn't bode well. According to the video game adaptation *Doom*, whose two-decade milestone was noted 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 establish a research facility. Currently, the bad stuff – in terms of plot and concerning garish film versions of a FPS video game – does not actually go down for two more decades in the future, so should we find a Martian gateway now, we could gain a respite to avert catastrophe. If we did discover a portal to an ancient Martian city, it's truly hard 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 funded himself, enabling him to assert messianic credit for mankind's journey to the cosmos. This precedes we even get to the harvesting of Martian chromosomes and resulting transformations into horrific creatures. (Once more, this is nearer 2046, distinct from the acclaimed director's film.) Overall, *Doom* is (if nothing else) a useful example for the reasons we let Mars become a long-term hope for mankind. Be it in the director's cheap-looking space-western *Ghosts of Mars*, the realistic science fiction of *Red Planet*, or the woo-woo spiritualism of *Mission to Mars*, our far-off planet doesn't tend to act as a beacon of optimism. Should someone wants to make that dubious red-planet real estate sale, maybe they ought to begin with first ensuring the fantasy version look good.

The Marvel Dregs

One of the strangest features of the present Marvel Cinematic Universe is the way it handles the various global cataclysms, including a half-decade leap whose occurrences are largely not shown in the movies themselves; the movies have become like a clock radio constantly running a few minutes fast – except with minutes, it's years. Consequently, there exists a whole bunch of Marvel stuff that fan sites clarify to be taking place in 2026. The good ones, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underrated adventure *The Marvels*, take place distant from Earth, and so feel quite detached from our sense of time. But the bad stuff is among the weakest Marvel has ever produced: the nonsensically meandering TV show *Secret Invasion* and the remote-meeting debacle of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Based on this stuff, we're in for a whole lot of annoying stagnation in 2026, along with the accompanying spin that actually, this confusing mess happening before our eyes is crucial to whatever happens next. More troublingly, in the actual world that claim will probably prove correct.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

The majority of the classic five-film *Planet of the Apes* series is set in the further-flung tomorrow of Earth, but the modern series that began with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* begins closer to home, initiating its timeline approximately 2016. Thus, when a virus that devastates most of Earth’s people has done its damage, and simultaneously enhanced the cognitive abilities of apes, it’s merely 2026, with additional setbacks for mankind (and simian triumphs) ahead. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, illustrating how rapidly this virus propagates globally and set around 2019, looks profoundly unsettling in the wake of the actual global health crisis 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 spread of Covid-19, and humanity, though clearly wounded by the ongoing virus, hasn't been wiped out, and technological infrastructure certainly has not been disabled. Yet this bleakest of the four contemporary *Apes* movies (to date!) nonetheless contains a substantial downer in store, suggesting that human and/or ape nature, whatever qualifies as either, will inevitably result in warfare, regardless of the work of the best-intentioned individuals. We’re subject to the whims of those who exploit others’ baser impulses, even if those instincts don't represent the majority. Right now, it feels hard to dispute that, despite the fact that we ought to try.

Metropolis

By far the best-known portrayal of 2026 in film is from a movie nearing celebrating its centennial. The director's iconic silent film *Metropolis* is set in a city of tomorrow where rich businessmen preside over the towers as laborers work tirelessly below the surface on the machines that keep everything running. Affluent city-dweller Freder, son of the city’s master, has his eyes opened to these massive social gaps when he becomes obsessed with Maria, an subterranean activist who preaches a coming together of the two halves of Metropolis. A scientist with darker plans builds a robot in her image, hoping to tear the whole of Metropolis down in flames. In this narrative, a robot designed to mimic a human isn't a tool of the ruling corporate class, but an entity who wants to witness their downfall; it's a component flipped by the modern world in a future that otherwise seems to be progressing. *Metropolis* also envisions a world where advanced machinery depends on old-fashioned human toil, which seems like a most logical fusion of rightwing contempt for “the working class” and corporate enthusiasm for an tech boom. It has not yet come to pass, but it's simple to imagine a slightly less stylish-looking version of Lang’s city expanding out with the prospect of a return to industrial production. The trickier, less plausible accomplishment is the conclusion of the film, where the gap between the wealthy and the have-nots is spanned with compassion; not so much with specific policies. Like *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie advocates coexistence; unlike *Dawn*, it seems optimistic about the possibility