While I prefer both "The Wrath of Khan" and "The Undiscovered Country" to "The Voyage Home" overall, I do find "The Voyage Home" to be perhaps the best Star Trek film as far as the treatment of characters go. All three of the aforementioned films, and "The Search for Spock" certainly capture the unique friendships and sense of camaraderie the TOS crew share, but in those films all that is forced to share the spotlight in those films with oncoming disasters, space battles, and villains.
There is an oncoming disaster the crew must work to stop in "The Voyage Home", but, in the words of Leonard Nimoy: "no dying, no fighting, no shooting, no photon torpedoes, no phaser blasts, no stereotypical bad guy". The result is not only one hell of a fun film, but a truly excellent piece of Trek writing, one which gives even Chekov something of note to do, stays true to every character, achieves emotional poignancy during the scenes with Kirk and Spock awkwardly re-establishing their friendship, and provides a lighthearted plot which nonetheless explores some big ideas (and ideals).
Amongst time travel Trek "The Voyage Home" is definitely bested by "The City on the Edge of Forever", "Yesterday's Enterprise", and "The Visitor" from TOS, TNG, and DS9 respectively, and is probably slightly less fun than DS9's legendary "Trials and Tribble-ations" but overall is an incredibly entertaining, fun time travel story better than any others that I haven't mentioned (including the films "Generations" and "First Contact"). The plot, which sees the crew go back in time to 1986 San Francisco to take humpback whales to the future to repopulate the species and save Earth works much better than you'd expect, but the movie really shines when the crew is in San Francisco in 1986 attempting to get the whales back to the future. Uhura and Chekov's quest for nuclear wessels, Scotty revealing the formula for transparent aluminum to a manufacturer, and especially, especially, Bones' hilarious outrage at the barbaric medical practices of the 20th century during his time at a hospital are a few of the highlights.
The script went through a lot to get to the final draft, but Nimoy stated that Nicholas Meyer gave the script "the kind of humor and social comment, gadfly attitude I very much wanted", so I guess we have Nicholas Meyer to thank once again for a great Trek adventure. You know, they haven't announced a director for the sequel to J.J. Abrams canonical reboot out May 8th yet, it's not too late to ask him to return... Harve Bennett, who had a hand in this entire trilogy (II, III, and IV, together one of the best film trilogies of all time), also deserves credit, and whomever the other writers were I'm sure. Great screenplay brought to life wonderfully well by Leonard Nimoy's direction (he really appears to have grown as a director since "The Search for Spock"), good cinematography, good design work, and superb effects.
Some dismiss "The Voyage Home" as silly and indulgent. I view it as a fantastic piece of violence-free Trek, and after a wildly off-mark attempt at hard sci-fi and two extravagant, though emotionally-grounded space adventures, the film series was wise to finally bring to the big screen what the original television series often did very well: a humorous fish out of water story with great characters, excellent dialogue, and a good overall story.
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