If you remember one thing about The Last Song, it’s the sea turtles. But you don’t remember one thing about The Last Song. You don’t remember one thing about The Last Song because you saw it in 2010 in your friend’s basement and immediately pushed it out of your brain to make room for AP Psychology notes and Foster the People lyrics.

So allow me to refresh your memory: Long-Brown-Hair Miley Cyrus stars as Ronnie, a teenager who rebels against her small-town family by wearing layered tanks. Ronnie, whose unusual name makes her a dynamic character, falls for sensitive animal-lover and native Australian mammal Liam Hemsworth. They speak to each other in exclamatory sentences. They kiss passionately. They passionately kiss. They help some baby turtles reach the sea.

Also Greg Kinnear is in this movie. He dies.

Despite all these promising plot points, The Last Song seems to be an underappreciated work in the Nicholas Sparks canon. Even dedicated fans believe it lacks the scale and emotional punch of The Notebook. According to Wikipedia, many critics “found its screenplay and casting incoherent.” I do not dispute these criticisms. The Last Song is soggy and silty and cardboard-thin. But The Last Song also has everything you could possibly want in a romance. It has puppy-dog eyes and wide shots of the ocean. It has teen angst and an original soundtrack. It has family values and a supporting character unironically named Blaze. Everything fits neatly into its predictable and contained little universe.

We don’t watch romance movies for their realism or their grit. We watch them for their mushy declarations of love, for their tortured metaphors, for the abs of Liam Hemsworth. We want unconditional love and certain resolution—the things that can be so scary and complicated in real life. Nicholas Sparks knows this. So though we might not want to admit it, The Last Song is a really satisfying movie. And as Ronnie sagely exclaims partway through the movie, “Truth only means something when it’s hard to admit.”