drwex | Can the director be wrong? (Inception)

This entire post is a spoiler if you still haven't seen Inception

I wrote about this back in July, in a post about the problematic ending of the movie.

Now there's a book out that contains the shooting script and, crucially, the director's timeline. Here, just stare at the picture for a while: http://incontention.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/inceptionpic-bg.gif

What this diagram seems to say is that the director believes that things happened as shown, and that everyone wakes up on the plane. Saito is screwed - stuck in Limbo - but Cobb makes it out and is reunited with his children. That's nice, and it's very interesting to see what the director thinks happened, but it doesn't deal with any of the problems people have noted with the film-as-filmed.

I'm reminded of the conversation around Blade Runner in which Harrison Ford denies that his character is a replicant, and Ridley Scott just shakes his head in amusement. Sometimes even the creators don't know what they've created.