"Some people live their whole life without ever falling in love. I lived my life and I fell in love." -- Leelee Sobieski as Samantha disagreeing with her father's wish that she'd never met Kelley.

Warning: This review contains spoilers. They will be marked.

Johnny Carson used to do a sketch on the Tonight Show where he was the host of a movie program. During that sketch he would invariably be doing a fake pitch on behalf of some non-existant sponsor of the movie he was allegedly showing and during that pitch, he would give directions on how to get to that sponsor's place of business. He almost always made a joke about "...the fork in the road". Here on Earth, which is a good movie that could have been a great movie is the best example of taking the wrong turn at the critical "fork in the road" that I've seen in some time.

Chris Klein, who was terrific in both Election and American Pie is Kelley. He is attending a very upscale prep school located near a small town that is at the opposite end of the economic scale. Kelley is due to give his valedictory speech over the weekend, and then he will climb into the brand new convertible that was just delivered to him at school and drive off into a sunset that includes entrance to Princeton. Kelley is a picture-perfect example of the spoiled rich child who is rebelling not because Daddy gave him a new convertible as a graduation gift, but because he couldn't find time to attend the graduation in person. So Kelley sneaks his car from the school motor pool for a joyride into town. In town he encounters "Samantha" who is working at her family's diner even though it is her graduation night, and Jasper (Josh Hartnett), Sam's boyfriend. There has been and is plenty of animosity between the town's teens and the students at the school and for some reason, Kelley wants to exploit this. The result is an exchange of words that escalates into a car chase that results in the destruction of the town's gas station and the diner.

The judge won't let Kelley's father or his money, or his high-priced lawyer buy Kelley's way out of this one. Instead she orders that Kelley and Jasper, as the two drivers of the cars involved in the chase, must spend the summer rebuilding the diner. Mabel's Table is a local institution and thanks to Kelley's dad, there is plenty of money to rebuild the diner.

Naturally, since Kelley is staying in town rather than in the now closed school dorms, he encounters Sam and along the way, they begin to develop a mutual interest. Whether it was his good looks that attracted her at first or not, when Sam discovers that the new boy in town shares a love of Frost poems, she is clearly hooked. How to resolve her relationship with Jasper, who is also her best friend as well as boyfriend is just one of the little problems that this star-crossed potential romance faces.

Spoilers follow from this point forward.

In spite of her family's objections, mostly due to the fact that Sam's older sister made a similiar mistake with a boy from the prep school and has a daughter to raise as a result, Sam is clearly enamored of Kelley rather than Jasper and she goes with him for a weekend in Boston. It is when their 'love' deepens that the wrong turn I mentioned earlier comes into play. Sam had received a full-ride scholarship to Boston University, thanks to her prowess as a track star. But an injury to her knee ruined that. Now she intends to go anyway, using student loans. This would have been a wonderful opportunity to explore the problems that this romance between lovers from opposite sides of the tracks would have faced in the real world. Boston and Princeton are not close and while Kelley's wealth might have given them opportunities for togetherness that others don't share, seeing where they went after the summer was over and both went off to school would have been fertile, unplowed ground to explore. Instead we're treated to yet another in the endless series of terminal illnesses that actresses suffer, almost always after finding the one true love of their life. It is as manipulative and predictable here as it was in "Love Story" and countless other such films.

What makes Here on Earth work is its incredibly gifted cast. Sobieski is one of the most talented young actresses of her generation and in this film she's given an opportunity to let her talents show through. She handles her impending death with a calm wisdom that only a teen who knows she is going to die and has come to terms with it could display. Klein is more than adequate and Josh Hartnett's Jasper manages to show wide range as he comes to terms with the realization that his love isn't returned in equal measure.

I adore Annette O'Toole, who is underutilized as Sam's mother. She, and the rest of the adults in the cast are backdrops for the teens who are front and center attractions here. If only screenwriter Michael Seitzman hadn't been afraid to try something different instead of falling back on a tried, true but utterly awful device to resolve his story.