MovieChat Forums > Feedback (2002) Discussion > much material pulled from Run Lola Run, ...

much material pulled from Run Lola Run, problems

posted 19 years ago by Tomasz_R
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Has anyone noticed how much of the story was taken from "Run Lola Run"?

A courier/runner for a smuggler/dealer loses his boss's money/property and is given the ultimatum to make it good in a short amount of time. The guy is desperate, and the devoted girl friend expends great effort to try and come up with the necessary money to get him out of trouble, involving along the way placing a bet at a roulette wheel, and multiple time loops, with some gained information being passed on between time loops. And much running around.

Instead of the changing of events in the time looping being an exotic ability of the girl as in Lola, in Feedback they bring in a third charcter with a stolen prototype time device. There is even an occasional hint of the driving techno beat in the background music of Feedback that dominated Lola.

Problems :

The guy with the device explains to his friends that the reason the device works is that time is an illusion of human perception, with the past, present, and future all being static, all part of the same unchanging universe that exists/has existed/will exist all at once. Then they spend the rest of the movie acting as if, and proving, that this is not so.

Phoning back and interacting with yourself, and changing your own past with a phone call, can't be done because it causes the feedback effect which undoes you. But phoning back to the past and interacting with your friends, who then intereact with you, and change your past in the same way as a result of the same phone call, this is perfectly okay?

There is the same type of time alteration that was objected to by some with Bill and Ted, even though there it was done for comic effect, of deciding on the spur of the moment that it would be convenient and useful for something to happen (e.g. finding keys/receiving a phone call), and so it does, as a result of future actions that have not yet been taken, and then the time traveller needing to remember in the future to go back and do this thing so that it really happens on cue when it was convenient for it to happen. If that was a stretch in a comedy, it should be a stretch in a film that is trying to be serious.

The guy with the prototype device stole it because they killed everyone else who was involved with it, and the guy with the device has people trying to kill him because he has stolen the device. Which is it?

Pay phones today are hard to find, usually have no marked number, and usually do not accept incoming phone calls, only place outgoing ones, and for a limited distance.

[–] araye 19 years ago

I do agree that much has been taken from run lola run, but it is a bit different. The main character wasn't Lenny, it was spread out between all three characters. In Lola, she was by far the main focal point.

And Im not sure if you were watching Feedback closely.

Your first problem was that they showed that time was running consistently at all times, and that the past present and future were going on all at the same time and this is proven by the end, because after having created the time loop by talking with himself, Lenny is dieing as his other/past self saves his girlfriend.

Your second issue: Interacting with your friends that then interact with you does not create the loop. Thats because it is indirect. When she called him in the club before he placed the bet, she left, and then he placed the bet. The change was told by her to him, not direct conversation with ones self. She didnt snatch the phone to say hello, but the thing that needed to be done, was.

Ok, so Bill and Ted did bring up a good point about finding the keys at the right moment, etc. but they were expressing comically how hard it would be to have had to remember in the future to leave them behind. And the difficulty was shown when he had to call them at 957 am. He woke up with a start and called, and he later complained of not having enough sleep.

And you were obviously not paying attention with your fourth comment. Mick said "some people", whom he did not know killed everyone involved in the project, and he took the machine so they would not get it. Now they are after him to obtain the phone. It was explained once, and it was accurately explained. You were probably too busy helping yourself to a large glass of hater-aid to listen.

And yes, payphones are few and far between, thats why all of the payphone scenes, all whopping two of them, were both filmed at the same meeting spot. One spot, one payphone in the whole movie.