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I remember not liking this movie as a kid (but all my friends liked it). I have several adult friends who can recite lines from this movie. So I watched it again recently. I can't believe how strongly I disliked it. I actually tuned it out halfway through, and read books/magazines while it played, then paid attention again during the final scene which I had specifically remembered from childhood.

There are no likable characters in this movie, with the possible exception of Louis (Rick Morannis) , who I found endearing. My biggest problem with the movie was Bill Murray's character. I think his character was trying to be funny. Maybe? My reaction to Murray's character was to intensely want to punch him in the face. Why didn't Sigourney Weaver punch him in the face? I don't know. Why didn't the overworked secretary (Janine) punch him in the face? I don't know. Why didn't his colleagues, the EPA guy, the list goes on and on, Bill Murray was a jack-a$$ who mocked everyone in the movie, yet inexplicably, everyone puts up with it.

A lot of people will dislike this review, because perhaps they really liked Murray's character. That's fine. But he wasn't funny, and he was a &^%#@ the whole movie. And the movie revolves around him.

There was one line, "When someone asks you if you're a god, you say YES!" That made my lip curl up, in the closest thing to a smile that the movie made me produce. This line was not delivered by Bill Murray.

Wow, this movie is a poster child for what's wrong with big budget science. At the beginning they show clips of conservative members of congress, who are arguing that the American version of CERN should be defunded. I'm sure this was intended to be a hit/slam, but I found myself agreeing with the politicians. For the record, I'm a science geek, with a degree in engineering, who reads books about quantum mechanics for fun (David Deutsch in particular is my favorite author).

The female lead, well, she was super-impressed by a 5 story structure. Kaplan, one of the male leads, comes off as very unlikable, although I warmed up to him by the end of the movie. Then there's the guy who won't collaborate with more than 2 colleagues, but Nobel prizes can only be given to a most 3 people. Great, this guy's ego is so big that he'll sacrifice science to protect his reputation.

There's very little science here beyond what's in the headlines. Basically, all this money was spent on CERN, they were expecting the Higgs to be in one of two places, but they found something (it must be the Higgs!) in a different place, therefore it's pretty much back to the drawing board. Perhaps science is at its limits - but you know what, Einstein didn't need an expensive CERN to know that general relativity was true. Yes, something is WAY off here, and this movie just solidifies that for me.

I'd give this movie more stars if it could actually tell me WHY a Higgs imparts mass to other particles (or anything interesting!) because the personalities of the people they interviewed were simply not interesting to me.

I get that Prof. Diamond is trying to answer the big questions of "why?" some civilizations invented "cargo" (material goods) and others didn't. I have not read the book, and just watched the first episode of this miniseries.

A lot of the details of the argument ring true to me. The worldwide distribution of beasts of burden, types of farm crops and weather patterns all certainly have an effect of the rise of civilizations. But this can't be the whole story, or even the major part.

When showing Diamond interacting wit the New Guinea folks, the emphasis was on the New Guinea struggles to get food. Hunting is inefficient, and farming is difficult labor due to the crops and lack of domesticated animals. Okay - but what was really striking is what was the lack of a written language. At the end of the episode, Diamond says something to the effect that if only geography had been different, then the New Guineans would have invented the helicopter, and not Westerners.

The problem with this argument, is that in order to invent a helicopter, you must first understand fuel, energy, materials, densities, air molecules, physics, weather, and hydraulics, just to name a few things. I agree with Diamond that the New Guineans are plenty smart to understand all those things, but in order to generate knowledge, a society must have a physical way to disseminate knowledge (scrolls, printing presses, paper, etc) and culture of acceptance of new ideas (criticism of new ideas is fine, indeed necessary to refine knowledge). Diamond didn't discuss the role of culture at all, and this is a huge omission.

Ultimately any theory of the rise of civilizations can be supported by cherry-picking data. This is a historians job, not a scientific endeavor. Diamond has his theory, and any number of people have their own theories. I personally don't find Diamond's theory to be very compelling.