Can someone please explain it to me. It's always struck me as an unusual thing to say.
I don't think I can explain it, but I have an idea. You're not alone, I too thought the line did not make any sense.
Much as I like this movie, I feel that the dialogue is very much the weak link, and (ironically) this is in part because it tried to be overly faithful to the text and the recorded words of the survivors. It makes the script rather clumsy in places and the words used, often taken out of sufficient context, sound "off" or even unintentionally funny. For example, people sometimes laugh at Carlitos' line "I feel so ashamed," when they take out the body of the woman who screamed in pain all night after the crash (Carlitos had yelled at her to shut up). In fact, he did say that, and he
was genuinely ashamed, but the film, being a visual medium, could not develop these nuances sufficiently, and it came off as stilted.
There were plenty of other example. I wondered if the exchange you're referring to might have derived from a difference in the original Spanish (I believe Read taped a lot of interviews with the survivors in Spanish, although all of them spoke English as well), and there is not the distinct difference in the Spanish equivalent between the English "nauseous" (feeling sick to one's stomach) and "nauseating" (causing a feeling of nausea). If a translation difficulty isn't the source, it may just be poor language choice by the scriptwriter. You can't say "(nauseous) to me" in English. It's an adjective that cannot take a preposition.
The boy says "I'm nauseous," meaning "I feel sick and don't want to eat," and the other one (can't remember who) says "Not to me," with a laugh, which is supposed to be a joke. It could have been a play on words, and the second one actually meant, ""You're not
nauseating," i.e. "You don't make me sick, you're fine."
There were other script errors, such as Nando saying on the top of the mountain where they see the whole panorama of the Andes before them, that it's been "70 days." That wasn't right, they had only left the fuselage a couple of days earlier, it was more like 64 days. I was surpised nobody did the math there.
But to sum up, I think that line was supposed to be a joke, and the intended play on words didn't work, because nauseous doesn't mean "nauseating," which the second boy must have meant.
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