Star Trek: Symbolism and a platform for the regret that the grown-up children of the 1960s feel for letting down the youth of today, just as they might have felt they were let down by their leaders.

Roberto Orci, who wrote the new “Star Trek” movie with Alex Kurtzman, acknowledged that its retro vision of an Earth at peace was meant as a tonic for an era when people wonder if perpetual war is becoming the norm. “We’re smack-dab in the middle of that very debate,” he said, pointing to the growing American military presence in Afghanistan and an increasingly worrisome situation in Pakistan. “It couldn’t be more stark now.”

“A lot of science-fiction is nihilistic and dark and dreadful about the future, and ‘Star Trek’ is the opposite,” Mr. Nimoy said. “We need that kind of hope, we need that kind of confidence in the future. I think that’s what ‘Star Trek’ offers. I have to believe that — I’m the glass-half-full kind of guy.”

SHOOT: Fascinating and insightful article this, from the New York Times. Sometimes analogies are more truthful and helpful than our attempts to face reality. In this sense, stories (fiction) can be powerful.

clipped from www.nytimes.com It takes a certain mix of optimism and frustration to contemplate the possibility of space travel. To dream of navigating the cosmos is to assume that man has the resources and the know-how to propel himself into the heavens, but also some compelling reasons to exchange his home planet for the cold vast unknown. “Star Trek” was meant to expand the notions of what a unified world could achieve — a mission that was deeply complicated by the turmoil of the era. And the newest incarnation of “Star Trek” arrives at a moment when the country again finds itself teetering between limitless potential and peril, yearning to boldly go in all directions but potentially stuck in neutral. The new film has plenty of modern-day angst to address too: the efficacy of torture is touched upon (though only the film’s villains employ it); an entire planet central to “Star Trek” lore is destroyed, intended by the writers as an amplified metaphor for the 9/11 attacks.