Alright, I just finished watching The Voyage Home. My thoughts:
It's not nearly as bad as I remember, but not great. The "alien probe" angle is a retread of The Motion Picture, but the difference lies in its use as an excuse for the crew to go back in time. The film is clearly the product of an attempt to make a more widely-appealing Trek, and as such the past-Earth scenes (the bulk of the film) really don't feel much like Star Trek. The bus scene in particular grates on me every time, as does Chekov's interrogation (come on, he really wouldn't know those expressions?) and Scotty talking into a mouse.
However, it does have several things going for it: It's about something, unlike The Search for Spock; it brings up a lot of the "utopian future" ideas that other films glossed over, bringing it closer in spirit to the intent of the original series; and the environmental message, while overbearing at times, is positive and quite ln line with what Trek is supposed to be about. Finally, it adequately wraps up storylines left lingering from Wrath of Khan and The Search for Spock.
The only other major problem I have with this is how it adds yet another incredibly inconsistent type of time travel, namely you can go to the past and change whatever the hell you want, but it won't make a difference in the future, whereas in the new film changing the past creates an alternative timeline from that point on, and on TOS episodes such as The City On the Edge of Forever, it's clear that any small alteration in the past will have grave effects in the future (the A Sound of Thunder idea).
All in all, not the greatest Trek film, but not the worst - merely average.
Final list:
- The Undiscovered Country
- The Wrath of Khan
- The Final Frontier
- The Voyage Home
- The Motion Picture
- The Search for Spock
Oh, and one last thing - how the hell did those whales breathe once they were beamed into the Klingon ship?