Released the same year as his James Bond blockbuster The World Is Not Enough, journeyman director and documentarian Michael Apted's science documentary Me & Isaac Newton pays unabashed homage to a brand of hero far from Ian Fleming's martini-swilling, skirt-chasing super-spy. Essentially a lighter, inferior version of Errol Morris' riveting Fast, Cheap & Out Of Control, Me & Isaac Newton documents the professional journeys and philosophies of seven scientists working to improve the world. A documentary with an agenda, Newton squarely contradicts the popular image of science as a cold, dispassionate discipline dominated by misanthropic atheists more concerned with beakers and data than with human beings. The film's scientists all seem motivated by an almost religious sense of wonder at the mysteries of the physical world, an obsession that carries them along parallel tracks to the tops of their respective fields. Out Of Control covered similar territory, but featured less than half as many subjects, and more is definitely less. Part of the problem is Apted's fawning treatment of his subjects, who share incredible brilliance and a fierce will to conquer the unknown, but also seem to share a lack of faults and weaknesses. They invariably come across as smart, ambitious, fundamentally healthy people, and while that might be good for science, it renders them fairly uninteresting. Even Steven Pinker, described as the bad boy of cognitive science, seems about as colorful as a Michael Bolton album; his only real eccentricity appears to be his tragic, prog-rock-inspired hairstyle. Apted's admiration for his subjects and their accomplishments seeps into every frame, but he fails to translate that appreciation into compelling filmmaking.