Run Lola Run

"It has been said that something as small as the flutter of a butterfly's wing can ultimately cause a typhoon halfway around the world" this single quote from the chaos theory tells us a lot from the theme of the movie Run Lola Run, a german movie from 1998 starring Franka Potente. This movie is anything to what we are used to about plot lines, in the beginning we have a lot of existential questions that won't be answered through the movie, but they will be developed somehow with the three different plots with the same objective. The changes in the plots are driven by the time, it doesn't matter if it is only a second of difference, defining it the dog at the stairs.


In the movie Lola has to help his boyfriend Manni to get 100,000 DM that he lost in the subway in order to not getting killed by the gangster who owns the money. The first time that she is in her mission, while going through the stairs the dog scares her so this makes her arrive early to his father and the mistress and also to the people and situations she encountered in the way, but she arrives late to Manni and takes the decision of help him assault the supermarket, this gets her killed, fail. 


But hey, she has the opportunity that none of us will ever have, a second chance, she can go back to the beginning and try it again like in a videogame. So there she goes, but now in the stairs the little brat makes her fall in the stairs so this makes her lose time. This little event makes that everything changes with the people and situations she encounters, it totally changes the future of the people, she gets the money but Manni gets killed. And yeah, by now you should figure that she will get another chance where she learned from her past experiences, and now becoming a very decided person, she isn't afraid of the dog, she will scare it, have luck in the casino, Manni will find the homeless guy and they will have the money on time fullfilling the objective.


The dog represents that time is not constant, a little change may trigger a different outcome, even miliseconds have a big influence in the future. This subject is the main study of many sciences like quantum, physics and that is because time has been the eternal enemy of the human being. How many times have we desired to go back in time to change something specific like an error, something that we could have done better. Well, Lola has that power and not does she only changes her life, but she changes everyones life she touches, giving them a horrible future or a good one.


Run Lola Run portrays the way we are slaves of the time and its unpredictable effects and changes, in the movie being the dog the main change. There is no way we can escape from it and we all wish to have second chances like Lola, that is why we like videogames so much, but the truth is that in real life we have to face the fact that we are doomed to walk always forward, not backward and that we can only turn our head hoping that what we have done was the correct thing.