This doesn’t surprise me at all, but apparently, the scene in Prometheus we discussed at length yesterday freaked out a lot of people before it scared the audience:
Even the monsters in Scott’s world were real — including the baby alien that Rapace’s Shaw rips out of her belly with help of a high-tech, robotic surgery machine — the kind every space ship without a doctor aboard should carry. The climatic scene in the middle of the film was shot over four days, a period that Rapace says she’ll always remember as the most stressful of the entire shoot.
The scene, according to Scott, is the one that tipped the film’s rating from a PG-13 to an R. The director said the only way to land the more family-friendly rating would have been to remove the scene entirely. “They didn’t even want the scene,” Scott said. “It wasn’t about just cutting it down, they didn’t want the scene.” And that was something neither Scott nor studio chief Tom Rothman wanted considering the importance of the sequence and the toll it took on the Rapace.
Given that both the themes and the plot of the movie are both totally dependent on that scene, I have a hard time imagining what the movie raters would have preferred as a substitute? Would they have wanted the snaky thing that killed members of the crew to come back for Shaw, even though it would have had no connection to her whatsoever? Could the movie have had a PG-13 rating if the alien had burst out of Shaw, and the medpod had healed the damage afterwards? It’s funny, how we have a tendency to treat damage done to women by other people as less threatening than women asserting their own autonomy over their bodies.