Oz boy rushed to hospital after seizure during graphic Prometheus scenes

Melbourne: A gruesome surgery scene in sci-fi movie ‘Prometheus’ proved too much for one teenage boy in Australia, who suffered a seizure and was rushed to the hospital, on Sunday. The boy’s collapse raised questions about the film’s rating, making people question if the movie, released on Thursday, was given too moderate a rating.

In the Ridley Scott feature, a prequel to his 1979 hit ‘Alien’, Noomi Rapace’s character Elizabeth performs an emergency caesarean section on herself to get rid of an alien, News.com.au reported. Although ‘Prometheus’, also starring Michael Fassbender, Charlize Theron and Guy Pearce, was given an R rating in the US, which restricts people under 17 from seeing it without an accompanying parent, it was given an M rating in Australia. The Australian Classification Board had originally classified Prometheus as MA15+, implying that those under the age of 15 needed to be accompanied by a guardian. But on appeal of distributor Fox, the condition was dropped so that the younger viewers could see it without an accompanying adult. The 15-year-old was watching the film at Jindabyne, in the state’s south, when he passed out during the scene and began having a seizure. He was rushed to Cooma District Hospital where he was in a stable condition. Sydney-based filmmaker Joseph Sims, who has seen ’Prometheus’ twice, said similar reports of moviegoers suffering seizures occurred when ’Pulp Fiction’ came out in 1994. Sims, who wrote and directed ’Bad Behaviour’ starring John Jarratt, said he thought the scene in ‘Prometheus’ wasn’t particularly gory, as they had “blackened” the colour of blood. “It was probably the squirming of the alien and the whole concept of the surgery, which is quite horrible,” he added. ANI