Fresh Start, Old Warnings: Lessons from Films Placed in 2026 Show Us?

The year 2025 might sound more futuristic. Maybe it's the presence of the consonant "f" in "five". However 2026 represents a leap forward, and it's where we currently stand, with every science-fiction-style advancement – chiefly the widespread adoption of AI – seeming dystopian, or possibly even worse. (It often seems like in a true dystopia, the mind-dulling corporate-backed dehumanizing technology would actually function more effectively?) Didn't anyone warn us regarding this?

The response, at least regarding our sci-fi movies from years ago (or sometimes months ago) set in 2026, is a mixed bag. Some of these prophecies are universally relevant (worldwide disaster) but in detail implausible (when mankind is inevitably ravaged, we will most likely 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 film-makers, from geniuses to grunts, thought we'd be positioned by now in our planet's development. Therefore, we shall examine at some of the films that have been set in 2026 throughout cinematic history and determine if they have anything to teach us.

The Game 'Doom'

Now, this doesn't bode well. According to the game-to-film translation *Doom*, whose 20th anniversary was noted by hardly anyone, 2026 is the year that humanity discovers a gateway to an ancient city on Mars, where the inhabitants of Earth are able to set up a research facility. Currently, the bad stuff – regarding narrative and concerning garish cinematic imitations of a FPS video game – doesn't really go down for two more decades later, so even if we find a Martian gateway now, we might have a respite to avoid true disaster. Were we to discover a passageway to an ancient Martian city, it's truly hard to determine whether a certain tech billionaire would still be super-psyched to dispatch people to Mars or would instantly become dejected that the portal wasn't something he funded himself, allowing him to assert savior-like credit for humanity's expansion to the cosmos. That's before we even get to the collection of Martian chromosomes and subsequent mutations into monstrous beings. (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 allow Mars serve as a long-term aspiration for mankind. Be it in the director's chintzy genre hybrid *Ghosts of Mars*, the more grounded science fiction of *Red Planet*, or the new-age mysticism of *Mission to Mars*, our distant neighbor planet rarely act as a beacon of hope. Should someone wants to close that dubious Martian real estate sale, perhaps they should start with first ensuring the fictional depiction appear appealing.

The Marvel Dregs

A of the strangest features of the present Marvel Cinematic Universe is the way it handles the various global cataclysms, encompassing a half-decade leap whose occurrences are largely not shown in the movies themselves; the movies have turned into a clock radio constantly set a few seconds fast – only instead of minutes, it's years. So there's a large assortment of MCU content that various wikis clarify to be taking place in 2026. The good ones, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underrated romp *The Marvels*, take place distant from Earth, and so feel pretty detached from any concrete 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 these examples, we're facing a great deal of annoying stagnation in 2026, along with the accompanying narrative that actually, this confusing mess happening in front of us is crucial to whatever happens next. More troublingly, in the actual world that claim will probably turn out to be accurate.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

The majority 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* begins nearer the present, starting its timeline approximately 2016. Thus, when a pathogen that knocks out the majority of Earth’s human population has done its damage, and also enhanced the cognitive abilities of primates, it’s only 2026, with additional human indignities (and simian triumphs) to come. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, depicting how swiftly this contagion spreads around the world and set around 2019, looks profoundly unsettling in the aftermath 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 already half a decade from the spread of Covid-19, and humanity, though clearly impacted by the still-spreading virus, was not wiped out, and our technology definitely hasn't been disabled. Yet this most pessimistic of the quartet of contemporary *Apes* movies (to date!) nonetheless contains a substantial bummer to offer, implying that human and/or ape nature, whatever qualifies as either, will unavoidably result in warfare, regardless of the efforts of the most well-meaning individuals. We’re subject to the whims of those who exploit others’ baser impulses, although those instincts are not held by the most. Right now, it feels hard to dispute that, despite the fact that we probably should.

The Silent Classic

By far the best-known depiction of 2026 in cinema is from a movie nearing marking its 100th anniversary. The director's iconic silent film *Metropolis* is set in a city of tomorrow where wealthy industrialists preside over the skyscrapers as laborers work tirelessly below the surface on the equipment that keep everything running. Rich city-dweller Freder, scion of the city’s ruler, has his perspective changed to these massive class divisions when he falls for Maria, an subterranean organizer who preaches a coming together of the two halves of Metropolis. A scientist with more radical plans creates a automaton in her image, aiming to tear the entire Metropolis down in flames. In this narrative, a machine designed to mimic a human isn't a tool of the ruling corporate class, but someone who desires to see them destroyed; it's one element flipped by the modern world in a future that otherwise seems to be well on its way. *Metropolis* also envisions a world where technology relies on traditional human toil, which seems like a most logical union of conservative contempt for “unskilled workers” and business zeal for an AI bubble. It hasn't yet come to pass, but it's simple to picture a slightly less stylish-looking iteration of Lang’s city expanding out with the promise of a resurgence to industrial production. The more complex, harder-to-imagine feat is the ending of the film, where the gap between the wealthy and the poor is bridged with compassion; rather than with concrete reforms. Similar to *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie pleads for peaceful cohabitation; in contrast to *Dawn*, it appears hopeful about the chance