Time and the effects of it are a great curiosity among many civilizations. Within the 1999 German film “Run Lola Run”, the aspects and sequences of time is highly emphasized, as main character Lola tries three times to get 100,000 dollars in 20 minutes before her criminal boyfriend Manni does something desperate. Each time either Lola or Manni ends up dying, the clock resets, and a new timeline is formed with only minor changes.

Before the time can change, however, we see a prolonged scene of Lola and Manni in bed discussing their love through life and death. As the scene takes on a red hue, the audience is supposed to see it as different, or other, akin to that of a “safe zone” or that of being in limbo. Both Lola and Manni are in bed, and their movements are slow, as even in one shot Lola is seen blinking slowly. Time is implied, then, to be at a stand-still. This is emphasized to an even greater degree, as the majority of the film follows Lola while she is in constant motion; running. The past, however, takes a gray tone, and the motions are sped up between all characters. “. . . [F]ilm is methodically set into action, and each seems as if it were accidental, but our knowledge that the actions are a planned expression by the artists opens up many metaphorical implications about life itself, our desire and inability to control life events, and the wonders and horrors of ‘destiny’” (Barrett, 18). This is the main aspect the film takes, as Lola and Manni get thrown back into the “game” of life whenever one or the other dies. “Run Lola Run” questions destiny in the thought of whether destiny is something preordained or merely circumstance, as anyone Lola comes into contact with has their lives changed in accordance with how and at what time she interacts with them, either intentionally or not.

The speeds of time are greatly dramatized depending on what feeling they wish to convey. “. . . [F]ilmmakers condense and expand time” “sometimes . . . dramatically speed[ing] up motion or slow[ing] it down”, as a way to emphasize the feelings and affects of the moment (Barrett, 10). This occurs many times, though most frequently when Manni is about to decide whether or not to rob the store and Lola is nearly there, when Lola is racing to meet with her dad, and when Lola makes prolonged eye contact to specifically important people. “Like gravity, time itself is intangible. While it is easy to overlook a force that we cannot see, the effects of time are critically important in all areas of art and design” (Stewart, 3). When Lola encounters key people the movie focuses on, shots are slapped onto the footage, similar to that of polaroids, summarizing the “what happens after” to the characters. The majority of the time, whenever she runs into that character the next time, their polaroids dramatically change. And what makes the changes so interesting is that they seem like events that should have nothing to do with the other, such as in regards to the first character Lola runs into. This woman is simply taking her child on a walk in a stroller, and Lola accidentally bumps into her when she is racing to meet her father. The images immediately laid on the screen show the woman getting forcibly removed from her child at some point later in her life, and in her despair, she is seen stealing another baby from another family. However, when Lola is instead tripped in her second time trying to meet her father, and is thus a few minutes early (as falling down the stairs is faster than running down them), the woman instead is shown to later win the lottery.