As Here On Earth dissolves into credits, it already seems like everything we've just seen couldn't have been real. Even the final shot leaves us with unanswered questions, such as, Is the golden field Samantha is romping through supposed to be heaven? Didn't she explicitly identify that spot by the river as her personal heaven? Does that mean she's in hell right now? To be sure, that's the first payoff in the film that would make any sense.

While it would be nice to think that Here On Earth features such unlikable romantic leads because it's so edgy, we suspect it's really just a colossal miscalculation based on how appealing Chris Klein and Leelee Sobieski were expected to be. The viewer is asked to invest quite a lot in these characters, but the film doesn't consider for a second that we might not be interested in following Kelley and Samantha into such dark and selfish territory.

The frightening alternative, of course, is that the people responsible for Here On Earth never saw Kelley and Samantha's behavior as dangerously reprehensible as it is, which means that they themeselves might want to consider therapy and/or never dating again. In fact, we see the film's failure at the box office as an encouraging sign that teenagers of the new millennium successfully inherited a fundamental understanding of right and wrong, and rejected a movie glorifying the latter.

Ultimately, however, Here On Earth isn't about Kelley and Samantha. Sure, they get the most screentime, and the musical score indicates that we're supposed to feel something when they're making out in the rain, but the real story here is one Jasper Arnold. First of all, he's the only character in the movie with an actual arc: he starts out one way, goes through stuff, and ends the movie as a different person. This is clearly not true for anyone else, who either starts terrible and ends terrible (i.e. Kelley), or disappears from the film entirely (i.e. Jen).

And in the end, despite the fact that Samantha walked all over him until the minute she died, and Kelley is such a prick that he won't even acknowledge him, Jasper is going to learn from this experience and make someone a great husband one day. Meanwhile, Kelley will continue to gaze soulfully past the camera, almost as if he can see Samantha in the next town, bounding through her new field and laughing about the time she faked having cancer to teach some rich kid a lesson.