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Run, don't walk, from this movie. It is excruciatingly boring and this from a person who likes slow movies. Think minimum of one-minute-long takes focused on the same subject where absolutely nothing happens. The message was supposed to be quite deep, I suppose, but it really wasn't "all that" – instead rather mundane. Numerous flaws were evident – the same goat wasn't even used throughout "the goat's" life (you could see from its markings), and at one point you could see that it was tied up so that it couldn't go far where instead it was supposed to have been stuck in a ditch. The landscape and village shots were supposed to be very beautiful, but actually they were nothing special and the colour washed out, at that. At one of the scenes which was supposed to be beautiful, I actually closed my eyes to rest from the crushing monotony of the film. A few forced laughs came at some of the scenes but it seemed more like people were just grasping at straws at something in the movie. If I hadn't been with friends, I would have walked out. For some reason this won best film at the Reykjavík International Film Festival, but the clapping at the end of the screening to a packed theatre was at most half-hearted – I imagine only the most artsy-fartsy could think this was a good film. Its only redeeming features was that it showed old-fashioned life in Italy and how charcoal is made, which was probably the most interesting thing of the film.

I was very disappointed with this series. It had lots of cool graphics and that's about it. The level of detail it went into was minimal, and I always got the feeling the audience was being patronized -- there was a lot of what seemed to me as "This is extremely cool but we're not going to explain it in further detail because you won't get it anyway. Let's just show you some pretty pictures to entertain you." The host would drop interesting-sounding words such as "sparticles" and "super-symmetry" without any attempt at explaining what it was. We had to look it up on Wikipedia.

Furthermore, I know quite a bit about superstrings (for a layman) and I found their explanations were convoluted and could have been so much better. They could have chosen MUCH better examples to explain concepts, but instead, the examples they used were confusing and further obscured the subject.

Additionally, I got so sick of the repetitiveness. They could easily have condensed the series into one episode if they had cut out all the repetition. They must have shown the clips of the Quantum Café about 8 times. The host kept saying the same things over and over and over again. I can't remember how many times he said "The universe is made out of tiny little vibrating strings." It's like they were trying to brainwash us into just accepting "superstrings are the best thing since sliced bread."

Finally, the show ended off with an unpleasant sense of a "competition" between Fermilab and CERN, clearly biased towards Fermilab. This is supposed to be an educational program about quantum physics, not about whether the US is better than Europe or vice versa! I also felt that was part of the patronizing -- "Audiences need to see some conflict to remain interested." Please. Give me a little more credit than that.

Overall, 2 thumbs down :-(