The book had a whole bunch of additional plotting at the beginning which initially drew me in. Unfortunately, it never really went anywhere interesting - it was

The book had a whole bunch of additional plotting at the beginning which initially drew me in. Unfortunately, it never really went anywhere interesting - it was all mostly just dropped - so I think the movie was justified in cutting it out. But the much bigger issue is that the story relies heavily on a kind of tense suspense/action, plus the wonder and terror of the basic premise: bringing dinosaurs back to life. But Crichton isn't particularly adept at descriptive literature, so that I thought the suspense/wonder/terror worked much better in a visual medium. This is not a case where there is something rather ambiguous best left to the shadowy imagination of the mind's eye. Maybe a different author could have pulled it off.