A century after its premiere, “Metropolis” It continues to function as an uncomfortably valid warning. Fritz Lang He imagined in 1926, based on a novel by Thea von Harbou, a futuristic city (located exactly in 2026) divided in two: at the top, the elite who enjoy technology, speed and comfort; Below, the workers who feed the machinery with their bodies and their time. It wasn’t just an industrial dystopia: it was an allegory of power. Just shy of its centenary, that image returns with renewed force, not because the chimneys smoke as they did then, but because the machinery crushes just the same, even though it has changed its shape. It is no longer iron and gears: it is code, algorithms, artificial intelligence and extreme concentration of wealth.
The central dilemma of “Metropolis” —the radical separation between those who control the system and those who support it— is projected today on a global scale. The technological and financial elites live in their own ecosystem, with access to capital, information, mobility and political protection. On the other hand, a majority that sees its place in the productive system becoming increasingly fragile. Machinery no longer oppresses only physically: it also does so invisibly, through automation, precariousness and job displacement.
This displacement also finds a contemporary metaphor in “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania”a movie from the Marvel universe also set in 2026, like all the films included in this column. Beyond its superheroic packaging, the film proposes a subatomic universe governed by a tyrannical, bureaucratic and abstract power, where the common individual —Ant-Man—is insignificant in the face of structures he neither understands nor can control. Scott Lang (who is not Fritz’s grandson but completes the story), played by Paul Rudd, is neither a demigod nor a billionaire: he is a worker, a father, someone from the common people who survives by adapting. The conflict is not just against a villain, but against a system that crushes without even registering who it crushes. Bureaucracy appears to be as lethal as direct violence. And the versus with the caste, with the system, is an element of growing seduction among the emulators that Javier Milei, for example, already has in the world.
That anger connects directly with the political and social anxiety that 2026 is going through. Artificial intelligence is no longer a future promise: it is an everyday tool that redefines entire sectors of the economy. Creative, administrative, technical and logistical professions are beginning to be threatened by systems that produce more, faster and cheaper. The parallelism with “Doom”a film from 2005 but set in 2026, is disturbing: in that fiction, humanity opens a portal that it does not fully understandin the name of scientific progress, and ends up releasing forces that surpass it. AI works today as that portal. It does not mutate bodies into monsters, but it can empty millions of jobs of meaning, eroding the material base on which democratic stability is built.
While figures like Elon Musk embody the most extreme side of the contemporary elite, they dream of the colonization of Mars but invest in artificial intelligence, there is a concentration of wealth without historical precedents. Space exploration reappears, as in so many science fiction fictions, not as a collective project of humanity, but as a private aspiration of magnates who no longer believe that the future is on Earth (the central theme of the film Alien, which had one of the jewels of 2025 with a series on Disney+). The political question is inevitable: What happens to those who remain at the bottom when those at the top are already imagining their exit?
This divorce between elites and majorities is the perfect breeding ground for regressive and violent responses. “Dawn of the Planet of the Apes” (from 2014, but also set in the current year) offers a brutal image of that scenario: a humanity decimated, fragmented and pushed to the brink of animalism, facing a new form of organized, disciplined and guiltless power. Beyond the artifice of the intelligent ape, the film raises a disturbing idea: when the system collapses, when institutions fail and when inequality becomes unbearablethe answer is not necessarily rational organization, but chaos (as suggested by Giuliano Da Empoli, favorite author of Santiago Caputo and dozens of political analysts). Humans, deprived of a horizon, retreat into fear, violence and the dehumanization of the other.
In a political key, this risk is latent in 2026. The combination of growing inequality, accelerated technological disruption and loss of confidence in democratic institutions generates fertile ground for authoritarian leadership, simplifying speeches and outbursts of force. The machinery of power, as in “Metropolis”, continues to work: what is broken is the link between that machinery and the real lives of people.
Lang closed his film with a phrase that is naive by today’s standards: “The mediator between the brain and the hands must be the heart.” One hundred years later, that idea sounds almost utopian. The heart, understood as social empathy, redistribution and limits to concentrated power, seems absent from the global debate. The 2026 policy faces a central challenge: eprevent the gap between technological elites and precarious societies from leading to a real dystopia, where the promise of progress ends up producing the exact opposite.
To close. Fictions do not predict the future, but they rehearse it. They function as oracles, not literal predictions. They are symbolic warnings of a future that, seen from today, no longer seems distant or abstract, but disturbingly present. The test that is repeated from “Metropolis” to “Quantumania”, passing through “Doom” and “Planet of the Apes”, is always the same: when technology advances, politics wears down and social justice disappears, the result is not liberation. And the fear is not of the machines, but of who controls them.
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