The absence of wonder (reprise)

This story was first published in 2019 to mark Tom Brady’s birthday. I’ve tweaked the ending to reflect the third era of his career.

IT’S AN ODD experience to think you’re about to die. It’s a lot different than how it’s portrayed in film and literature. So incredibly mundane, my life didn’t flash before my eyes, nor was there even a splinter of light to step into. Instead, as I collapsed on my sitting room floor, I turned to my wife and said: ‘Please don’t let me die watching The Phantom Menace.”

I don’t remember a huge amount about the hours following that moment. Fragments of memories — like overhearing nurses tell the story of a man who’d died during his Christmas dinner only for his family to think he’d fallen asleep and pose for pictures with him until they realised — sometimes flicker briefly into existence; only to frustratingly trickle away before I can tell if they are real or not.

I think about my Phantom Menace moment a lot though. Most recently because I’ve started to read a lot of Isaac Asimov again. For those unfamiliar, Asimov is widely regarded as a pioneer of science fiction, who wrote or edited more than 500 books, and whose sideburns could legitimately be classified as the eighth wonder of the world.

His Foundation series of books (originally a trilogy but later expanded) about the waning days of a future Galactic Empire, had a huge influence on the original Star Wars movies. Asimov didn’t mind, for he had based those books on Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, proving beyond doubt that Mark Twain was correct when he said that “the actual and valuable material of all human utterances is plagiarism.”.

Asimov wasn’t too bothered about plagiarism, in fact, he later said of George Lucas’s project:

“In the late 1970s the Galactic Empire reached the movies in the enormously popular Star Wars, which, here and there, offered rather more than a whiff of the Foundation. No, I don’t mind. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and I certainly imitated Edward Gibbon, so I can scarcely object if someone imitates me.”

But it’s another Asimov work, Nightfall, that I think of when I consider The Phantom Menace in particular.

Nightfall is a brilliant piece of science fiction. In it, the planet Lagash (named Kalgash in a later, extended version of the story) bathes in perpetual sunlight from at least one — often more — of the six suns that illuminate the planet’s surface. Those suns are:

Onos, a yellow dwarf similar to our sun
Dovim, a red dwarf
Trey and Patru, a white binary star system
Tano and Sithathat, a blue binary star system

Because of the nature of their orbits, as well as that of Lagash, night time does not exist as a concept on the planet.

However, a mathematical analysis of Lagash’s peculiar orbit around its primary star reveals the existence of a moon, which scientists on the planet imaginatively call Lagash Two. They calculate that this moon is perfectly placed to cause a total eclipse of the sun Dovin once every 2049 years, at the exact time it is the only visible star in the sky.

This is end-of-world stuff for the people of Lagash. Having evolved on a planet without night, Lagashians are armed with an intense fear of the dark and experiments reveal that they can suffer permanent mental damage, and even death, after as little as 15 exposure to darkness.

The total eclipse of Dovin is projected to last for several hours.

However, despite the fact that another team of researchers have discovered that once ever 2,000 years, Lagashi civilisation completely collapses — each time destroyed by fire — any warning of impending doom is mocked and ignored.

Eventually, and after much pleading, oral accounts from previous civilisations — passed down by children and the barely animated husks of those adults who survived the nightfall — are finally taken seriously and the scientists hope that their efforts, and general understanding of what happens during an eclipse, will break the cycle of societal meltdown.

When darkness finally spreads over Lagash, however, nobody is prepared for the effect of the stars. 30,000 of them fill a night sky that nobody alive has ever seen before. Indeed, until Lagash Two drifted in front of Dovin, as far as most people were concerned, the universe consisted of their planet, their newly discovered moon, and six stars.

The sight of thousands of new suns twinkling in the sky — and perhaps the realisation of how insignificant they are in the grand scheme of the universe — drives everyone on Lagash, including the scientists, mad. The story closes with the horizon on fire; yet another Lagashi civilisation turned to ash.

Cool story bro, but what has this got to do with The Phantom Menace? Well, in 1999, Star Wars Episode One was widely, and roundly, panned by critics and cinema-goers alike.

Eli Roth, director of Hostel, wrote at the time:

“Few films in history have had greater anticipation than The Phantom Menace. People have been waiting on line for over a month to get tickets. I know I have been waiting since 5th grade, following every rumour in “Starlog” and on the Internet. So here’s the kicker: IT SUCKS. I’m sorry, it does. I know it’s sacrilege to criticise George Lucas or the Holy Grail of movie trilogies, but after waiting 16 years I can honestly tell you this film is an unbelievable disappointment.”

And that was one of the better reviews.

Up until a few years ago, I would have agreed wholeheartedly with this opinion of The Phantom Menace. And don’t get me wrong, the movie is still hugely problematic in terms of some of the characters. Viceroy Nute Gunray and the leadership of the Trade Federation, Watto, and — infamously — Jar Jar Binks, have all the racial sensitivities of a Bernard Manning sketch.

But after watching it again a number of times recently, I’ve started to change my mind on The Phantom Menace. While I still wouldn’t like it to be the last thing I saw before shuffling off my mortal coil, the movie is practically a masterpiece compared to Attack of the Clones, for example.

So why did I hate it so much at the time? Was it that there was too much hype, too much expectation, and so disappointment was inevitable. That’s certainly what the great critic Roger Ebert thought when he wrote of the film:

“How quickly do we grow accustomed to wonders. I am reminded of the Isaac Asimov story “Nightfall,” about the planet where the stars were visible only once in a thousand [sic] years. So awesome was the sight that it drove men mad. We who can see the stars every night glance up casually at the cosmos and then quickly down again, searching for a Dairy Queen.”

The Phantom Menace is an astonishing achievement in imaginative film making. But we had come to expect so much from Lucas and Star Wars that it was easy to forget that the Skywalker saga was always about new things to look at, and new ways to look at them, more than it was ever about storytelling.

Likewise, we’ve become so used to seeing Tom Brady playing in the Super Bowl that it can be difficult to take stock of just incredible his career has been. 21 seasons, 14 Conference Championship games, 10 Super Bowl berths and now, remarkably, a chance to lift a seventh Vince Lombardi trophy. For context, no team has managed to win more than six.

And what’s even more impressive is the level at which Brady is performing. Sure he threw some questionable picks against Packers in the NFC Championship game, but none of them were as bad as the one he fired toward Robert Alford in that Super Bowl against the Atlanta Falcons and that turned out okay. My point? This has always been part of Brady’s game but it’s the other passes, the touchdown to end the first half in Green Bay when many other QBs would think about taking a knee, that sets him apart.

And despite all of this, few people are giving Tampa Bay a shot in Super Bowl LV. But whether the Bucs win tonight or not, Brady’s legacy as the greatest quarterback we have ever seen. But if he does, we then start to have a conversation about whether or not the former sixth round pick from Michigan has had one, two, or three Hall of Fame careers.

I can’t quite believe I’m writing this about a man who has been to an unprecedented 10 Super Bowls this century, including four of the last five, but there’s a real chance we undervalue Tom Brady.

How quickly we grow accustomed to wonders indeed.