My Twenty-Five hour attempt at a Marvel Marathon

WORDS BY DEIRDRE MORGAN

In case you’ve been living under a rock, Marvel’s “Infinity Wars” came out on April 25th, pegged as the biggest superhero blockbuster released to date. But unlike most Marvel fans, my friend and I didn’t spend the day watching the newest release. We decided instead, to watch every single Marvel film in chronological order. Yes, that’s over twenty-four hours’ worth of viewing CGI fight-scenes and Iron Man one liners. Oh, and spoiler alert?
 
We failed.

Limited by our laziness and unwillingness to spend money, the movie marathon was looking poor in the snacks department. Grand plans of pizza and cookie dough turned into Anzac biscuits and happy hour sushi. But by 8pm, we were ready to start.
 
Now, I’m not a marathoner. I’ve never run a marathon in my life. But my thinking was that sitting down and doing nothing but watching movies for twenty-four hours shouldn’t be too hard, right?
 
Wrong.

All was well for the first couple of hours. We had good chats, used Anzac biscuits to make ice-cream sandwiches, and managed to stay quite awake until 4am despite having been awake since 6am the previous day (probably poor preparation in hindsight). We thought for a moment that we might be able to successfully waste a whole day of our lives watching Marvel movies. But when the clock struck 4, everything changed. Eyelids started getting heavy. Speech was somewhat delusional. At this stage we were already up to the first Avengers, but is it fair to say that I watched Avengers if I was constantly having micro-naps? I’d sometimes close my eyes for what felt like a second, only to open them up again and realise I had missed entire scenes. Had I already failed the marathon? For now, let’s just pretend I hadn’t.
 
With my friend threatening to pinch or scream at me if I dared to fall asleep, I pushed through the early hours. But those early hours posed another challenge: a challenge of guilt. And by guilt I mean that while we were sitting there watching movies in the morning, everyone else was waking up to go to dawn services across Australia.

When the sun had finally risen, it didn’t even feel like a new day. If I thought I was delusional before, I must’ve been something else by 7am, because I was asking myself weird-ass questions like “are days real? Does time exist?” I’m not going to lie: I’ve never pulled an all-nighter before. But note to self future self: never pull an all-nighter because whatever I write up will probably sound like some drunk internal monologue.
 
All up, we finished just over half the marathon – 9 out of 17 movies. In Uni terms, that’s barely a pass. Hopefully our mid-sems come out with a better score *nervous laughter*