Thank God for the 8th Amendment

  I think it's fair to say that White Bear's ending was not expected. It certainly threw me for a loop.
Throughout the movie, we're following the actions of someone who just woke up in some sort of apocalypse that turns average people into a mindless audience. At least, that's what we're told. This led me to be unimpressed with the film, at first, as it seemed like any other apocalypse film. Although, after the ending my attitude was entirely different. That being said, even though it was a great twist, I can't help but disagree with the justice system featured.

  To start off, I don't agree with how she was punished, in both the method and repetition. I am a firm believer in the right to not be punished cruelly or unusually, and this movie definitely falls under one of those. I understand the desire for justice, and this does seem pretty just. However, I don't believe in the legal precedent this would set for all other crime. This is torture, they are submitting her to torture for no better reason than it makes them feel better. I'm all for punishing the guilty, but standards matter. What's to say some lawyer can't generalize this to lower crimes regressively?  Can you imagine what the consequences would be if someone was tried and convicted on faulty evidence, later proven untrue? I don't like where that leads.

  Secondly, in support of calling it torturous, this has to be mentally traumatic. In the movie we are shown through the eyes of Veronica that she absolutely has some lasting repercussions from this procedure. There are several scenes in which she has painful flashbacks from the previous runs. When she wakes up she's in a state of complete confusion, maybe even panic. Try to imagine waking up and forgetting your own name, and who you are. I don't find anything about traumatizing an amnesiac just.

  This one is more political, but how do you think other nations see, what I'm going to assume is, the UK when they learn of how they punish some of their criminals. It can't reflect good on them. We left barbarous sentences and treatment of prisoners in the past, how would their position on the world stage change once other countries see how much they've degraded.

Lastly, surely there has to be an effect on those who run the event. Surely waking up everyday to manipulate someone into believing a lie and proceeding to terrify them on multiple occasions can't be good for your psyche. And if one of them snap and start killing people, do they get the same treatment, thus continuing the cycle? It's said that torture hurts the torturer mentally just as it hurt the receiver physically. Then again, this isn't real, and maybe I'm reading to far into this. All I can say is, thank God we have the 8th amendment!