While enjoyable, the characters suffer from any development at all. When Crichton says IT guy, he expects you to believe that a character comes with everything you would expect a stereotypical it to be. The science of it all is paper thin and the use of "Chaos Theory" to explain everything that goes wrong when really it's just poor planning and management is plain annoying, particularly when it's delivered by the pseudo philosophy churning mathematician. I found I had to skip chunks of text as soon as Ian Malcolm started talking towards the end as added nothing to the story and only helped to drive Michael Crichton's clearly anti science views. Despite all the negativity, it was still enjoyable in parts, perhaps longer than it should have been, the whole chasing raptor nest plot didn't make any sense and for the first time in my life, I found myself looking forward to the scene where the little girl is decapitated by the raptors (unfortunately it doesn't happen) so that the incessant whining would stop, it was very hard to believe that a 7yo girl would be whining about ice-cream after being chased down by an 8 foot lizard and watching someone being eaten alive. The movie did a great job of toning down the bad parts of the book and capitalising on the thriller moments, in this case I say the movie is clearly the better of the 2.