Did critical success matter?

Well early on no, it didn't. I mean the fan base was so loyal and there was a hipness factor of young people wanting to reconnect with what their parents might have been watching and you had these ageing baby boomers who were suddenly excited about going back to their days as kids

Alien was much more of a critical success but Star Trek had a real franchise appeal to it. One of the reasons it probably wasn't as good a movie as Alien is because of Roddenberry's insistence on maintaining the Utopian Society.

It exposed on the big screen what probably wasn't that apparent on the small screen � although most people probably knew, which was that several of the actors in the show were not the best actors. Captain Kirk on the big screen, suddenly his facial expressions and his mannerisms of William Shatner were a lot more noticeable. But, at the same time, they held a camp appeal as well.

There definitely was a camp appeal to seeing William Shatner attempt to act.. It becomes larger than life. It was one of the first successful TV to film adaptations. It spawned a whole unfortunate trend in Hollywood of taking old TV shows and turning them into films.