how much more graphic was the novel?

Benefited how? Certainly not financially. This was a family-friendly blockbuster. People took their children to see it multiple times. Making it darker would risk alienating the target audience.

Now, if you mean in terms of storytelling? Possibly. The scene where the T-rex chases Alan, Tim, and Lex along the river, or going through the Aviary could have made for a much more intense film.

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Listen to them—the children of the night. What music they make!

I'm not sure from your post whether you've read the novel, but assuming not.... it's considerably darker in tone and much more violent. It's also just more of an adult book in the sense that it goes much more into InGen's past, Chaos Theory, and the minutiae of how the park was run, so understandably much of that was cut to make for a more streamlined crowd-pleasing film which wouldn't bore children to tears.

It made total commercial sense to tone it down into a family film, and considering I was a kid when it came out I'm glad they did! However it's one of my favourite books so I'd love to see a more faithful adaptation. If the gore was depicted exactly the same as the novel I'm guessing it'd get a UK rating of 15 or 18 - I guess the US equivalents are R and NC-17.

A few details on the tone of the book below, if you're interested...

It opens with a fatally injured park worker being taken to a doctor in Costa Rica, having been savaged by a raptor. The opening scene of the film was inspired by that chapter, but in the novel it's purely told from the perspective of the doctor examining him. The next few chapters deal with compys on the mainland; a girl gets bitten on the beach (like the opening scene in The Lost World), and babies are being attacked/killed in their cribs. Once the park starts to fail characters frequently get eaten alive and/or disembowelled, a couple of dinosaurs get blown up by rocket launchers or poisoned, and a few passages describe dinosaurs attacking/killing each other. The kids are in danger more frequently, as their journey back to the Visitor's Centre involves an inflatable raft, the adult T-rex, a waterfall, and passing through the aviary full of territorial pteradactyls. Malcolm spends the last chunk in a morphine-induced daze, with raptors chewing through the metal bars on the skylight above his bed. Hammond's fairly unlikeable and ends up falling down a hill, breaking his ankle, and getting bitten to death by compys. It ends with the island getting firebombed.

The novel was far more bloody and violent than the movie. like Nedry's death scene for example. in the movie it shows the car rocking back and forth as he's getting attacked by the Dilo, in the book the Dilo slashes his guts open and Nedry is holding his intestines in his hand before he basically gets decapitated.

I recall Newman's death in the novel being more graphic.

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