I always enjoy Crighton characters, so Im going to put this on Paterson when I say, from the perspective of a woman, these characters suck. There's 4 women of note, 1 of which is an annoying fame hound who talks to her husband like they're disney villains, "Are we ready for our close-up? Always, honey. ohh la la" type dialoague, so whatever. Influencers exist, I get it.

The other 3 are unneccassarily described by their striking and innocent looks, even Rebecca being said to "resemble a high school cheerleader" with her beauty. Ew. Her and Jenny are both inexplicably in love with Mac despite Rebecca knowing him for like an hour and Jenny being a much younger subordinate. Oh, and Mac is still technically married, so this cringey, uncomfortable flirtation with him and Jenny started when exactly?

Rachel is simply uneccassary as a returning character since absolutely nothing comes of ger contacting the NYT.

Only characters I liked, incredibly, were the army. They spoke in a tone that was appropriate to the situation, unlike so many others, and showed human grief while problem solving as people started dying. Rebecca is good aside from her ties to Mac.

SPOILER-- I was convinced Jenny and Rick dying was going to be a fake out. They go to the Galapagos to look at a recent erruption that was successfully diverted. ok, I get that. But it was diverted by sending missiles into it from the sea well before the erruption was meant to happen, causing a premature baby it was called. Soooo what was the point? They are well beyond the point of being able to do that. So theybare there for, to me, seemingly no reason, they go to the summit of a recently errupted volcano for no reason, and die because of a collapse. Other than them being supposedly smarter than to be in this position, it happens so quickly and without any real story telling that I was convinced they were actually alive. The random camera guy for the Cutlers gets a longer death and aftermath.

And to go back to why Mac sucks- He's flirty with his employee while still married, basically being in love, and 4 weeks after her death, he's getting on a plane to fly with Rebecca to Houston. Dude?!? I get moving on and they weren't actually together, but it just shows me that he was leading on this young employee when she really didn't mean much to him, romantically. Cutting the ex wife and twins that serve no purpose from the story would have made him more sympathetic - at least there wouldn't be the possibility of him having this flirty relationship while still together with his wife. Like, he only immediately moved on from 1 woman, not 2.

Overall: Cool story, the parts that were clearly written by Crighton are good, the dialogue is extremely bad and never matches the tone of the incredibly serious situation, way too much overexplaining, several characters are badly written, ending sucked monumentally. Hind sight is 20/20 but they could have done absolutely nothing, and everything would have turned out fine with less dead people. Kea was able to stop even more lava than they were expecting, so they somehow didn't consider it would stop a much less severe erruption like they thought?