A new year, old warnings: what can movies set in 2026 teach us? | film

2025 seems more futuristic. Maybe it’s the “f” sound in “five.” But 2026 is still one step ahead, which is where we are now, where every science-fiction development – ​​especially the widespread adoption of artificial intelligence – looks miserable, or perhaps worse. (Doesn’t it seem as if, in a dystopia, anti-human, corporate-backed technology would actually work a little better?) Didn’t anyone warn us about this?

The answer, at least when it comes to the sci-fi movies we’ve been making for years (or sometimes months) that are set in the year 2026, is yes and no. Some of these warnings are broadly applicable (global catastrophe), but particularly far-fetched (when the human race inevitably perishes, we will almost certainly take the apes with us). Some of them are visionary. Others look like bad green screen. But it’s worth examining where many filmmakers, from geniuses to grunts, think we’ll be by this time in our planet’s evolution. So let’s take a look at some of the movies set in 2026 over the years and see if they have anything they can teach us.

death

Well, that doesn’t bode well. According to the video game Doom, which recently celebrated its 20th anniversary, the year 2026 is the year in which humanity discovers a portal to an ancient city on Mars, where Earthlings can set up a research facility. Now, the bad stuff — both in terms of plot and in terms of the flashy cinematic imitation of a first-person video game — won’t really continue for another 20 years in the future, so even if we discover a portal to Mars this year, we might have some time to avoid a real catastrophe. If we discovered a portal to an ancient Martian city, it’s really hard to know whether Elon Musk would still be so excited about sending everyone to Mars or whether he would immediately feel depressed that the portal wasn’t something he personally paid for, allowing him to claim messianic ownership of humanity’s expansion to the stars. And that’s before we get to the harvesting of Martian chromosomes and subsequent mutations into horrific creatures. (Again, this is closer to the year 2046, and not to be confused with the Wong Kar-wai film.) Overall, Doom is (if nothing else) a good test case for why Mars should be allowed to become an extended hope for humanity. Whether in John Carpenter’s space western Ghosts of Mars, the more grounded sci-fi of Red Planet, or the mystical mysticism of Mission to Mars, our distant neighboring planet tends not to serve as a beacon of hope. If anyone wants to make a shady real estate sale on the red planet, they should probably at least start by making the fictional version look good.

The miracle of dregs

One of the most bizarre quirks of the current Marvel Cinematic Universe is how it accounts for the various catastrophes that threaten the world, including a five-year time jump whose events are largely not depicted in the films themselves. The films have become like a clock radio that always runs a few minutes faster – only instead of minutes, it’s years. So, there’s a whole bunch of Marvel events that many wikis state will take place in 2026. The good stuff, like Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3 and the fun series The Marvels, is set far from Earth, and thus feels completely untethered to our sense of time. But the bad stuff is some of the worst Marvel has ever produced: the meandering, meaningless TV show Secret Invasion and the Zoom-call farce of Ant Man and the Wap: Quantumania. Judging by these things, we’re in for a lot of frustrating spin in 2026, including an accompanying spin that, in fact, this illogical nonsense unfolding before us is essential to whatever happens next. Worse still, in the real world this assertion is likely to prove true.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

Most of the original five-film Planet of the Apes series takes place in Earth’s distant future, but the new trilogy that began with 2011’s Rise of the Planet of the Apes starts closer to home, starting its timeline around 2016. So, by the time a virus that wipes out most of Earth’s human population has done its damage, and also enhanced the apes’ intelligence, we’re only in the year 2026, with more human insults (and ape triumphs) to come. The end credits sequence for Rise, which shows how quickly this virus is spreading around the world and the start of 2019, feels downright quaint in the wake of the real pandemic that will emerge in 2020. By comparison, Dawn feels more abstract; If you can believe it, we are already six years away from Covid-19, and humanity, though clearly infected by the still-spreading virus, has not been wiped out, and our technology has certainly not been wiped out. But this darkest of the four contemporary ape films (at least so far!) still carries with it a major problem, suggesting that human and/or ape nature, however qualified as either, will inevitably lead to violent conflict, no matter the work of the well-meaning among us. We are at the mercy of those who exploit the worst instincts of others, even if those instincts do not represent the majority. Right now, it’s hard to argue with that, although we probably should.

Metropolis

By far the most notable depiction of 2026 in cinema is from a film approaching its centenary. Fritz Lang’s silent classic Metropolis is set in a futuristic city where wealthy businessmen control skyscrapers while underground workers toil on the machines that keep everything running. Freder, a wealthy surface dweller, descendant of the city’s ruler, has his eyes opened to these vast social gaps when he becomes obsessed with Maria, an underground organization that heralds a rapprochement between the two halves of Metropolis. A scientist with more radical plans creates a robot that looks like her, hoping to set the entire city of Metropolis on fire. Here, a robot designed to imitate a human is not a tool of the corporate ruling class, but rather someone who wants to see it destroyed; It’s one element upended by reality in a future that otherwise seems to be on its way. Metropolis also imagines a world in which technology relies on ancient manual labor, which seems like a more plausible union between the right’s disdain for “unskilled workers” and corporate enthusiasm for an AI bubble. That hasn’t happened yet, but it’s easy to imagine a somewhat less elegant version of Lange City expanding with the promise of a return to manufacturing. Even more difficult and difficult to imagine is the film’s ending, where the gap between the haves and have-nots is bridged by love; Not so much with specific policies. Like Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, the film calls for coexistence; Unlike Down, he seems optimistic that such coexistence can be achieved. Given how the billionaire class (or even less rarely, the millionaire class) reacts to any suggestion that they should address the needs of the less fortunate, the idea that confronting any degree of extremism might discipline them seems fanciful now – more so than it did a century ago. Robots, caverns of toil, glittering skyscrapers…it all sounds reasonable enough. For a rebalancing of economic gaps to seem likely, we may have to wait another year. Or a hundred.