As always with Speilberg most of the plot got edited out in the second draft, but they kept some of it, more than they kept with 2.
These kinds of movies annoy me. I can enjoy fantasy or science fiction, but I hate it when the technobabble isn't reviewed by scientists. The last monster movie with decent technobabble was "Them," done in 1958.
JP1 did the amber thing pretty well, but the spew on chaos theory was painful to watch.