Rise up brothers and sisters. It’s National Geek Pride Day. No longer shall we hide in the shadows of the boring and judgmental. Be liberated from your chains. Celebrate all that is geeky!

To celebrate National Geek Pride Day, let’s take a look at the rise of sci-fi within mainstream media which has come to define our generation.

A geek should avenge The Avengers

Based on the equally as popular Marvel comics which began in the 60s. Everyone and their dog has seen the modern Avengers film franchise. Starting with Iron Man in May 2008, the Marvel Cinematic Universe has redefined cinema, making geekiness somewhat standard for movie lovers.

There’s now a total of 33 released MCU films, which for the most part are a fantastic watch, and another 7 known projects in the works. No doubt Marvel have more up their sleeve.

These films set the bar for overarching narratives across different films, and constantly strove for better CGI (once upon a time).

Basically, they made superheroes cool.

“The Infinity Saga” culminated in the “Avengers: Endgame” which was the highest grossing film of all time on release and still sits at number 2. However, since then it’s widely been acknowledged that the quality of the films have dropped significantly.

The most recent MCU film, “The Marvels”, didn’t even break even and was the lowest grossing MCU film ever.

Regardless of the superhero phase of our media being over, there will always be iconic scenes engrained into the psyche of any 20-30 year old. Scenes like Thanos capturing all of the stones, Peter Parker crumbling into dust and Tony Stark snapping his fingers for one last sacrifice were peak pop-culture.

Between 2015 and 2019, Avengers hype swept over the globe and suddenly everyone was a geek. Hopefully, one day we’ll get back to that marvelous time

Carrying the torch: Dune

Since Star Wars isn’t very good now, and neither is the MCU, something has to fill the sci-fi void.

Just like a messiah sent from another planet, the Dune franchise has done exactly that. There were two different reactions to “Dune: Part Two” earlier this year. There were the naysayers: “that was too slow and I didn’t get it.” And there were the believers: “That was f*cking sick.”

Max, 21, Leicester, is a super geek. He devoured Frank Herbert’s main series Dune books before the films were ever a twinkle in Denis Villeneuve’s eye. Guess which category he falls into:

“The scene where Paul gives the speech at the Fremen council is so legendary. I’m generally not a big fan of Timothy Chalamet as Paul but for those two minutes who dropped one of my favourite performances of all time, perfectly complemented by Javier Bardem’s zeal. That scene is everything. Javier Bardem honest to god deserves best supporting actor.”

Dune has moved the goalposts for creating a fulfilling recreation of hard sci-fi novels. You can see the hard sci-fi snowball beginning to roll already. Netflix’s Three Body Problem series (based on the novel of the same name by Cixin Liu, which is the single best book I’ve read in the last few years), has proved immensely popular. It debuted with 11 million views in its first week, and falls into the same “concept driven and space opera” category as Dune.

The back catalogue for space sci-fi literature which hasn’t yet been explored cinematically to the same scale as Dune has is endless. Asimov, Tchiakovsky, Hamilton: the stories are already there. It just takes a good director with a vision to make it happen, just as we’ve seen with Dune and Villeneuve.

As we get older and mature out of our comics and capes phase, sci-fi cinema and television is seemingly maturing with us. Embrace it geeks. Our time is now!