From 1978 to 1995, Ted Kaczynski sent 16 package bombs which killed three and injured 23 and prompted the largest FBI manhunt in history. How he was apprehended and supposition of how he may've been sent down this path of anarchic destruction and terrorism is the subject of the latest Netflix Original movie which goes by his nickname, Unabomber.
Opening in 1995 after the Washington Post published the Unabomber Manifesto, a 35,000-word screed against technology and industrialized society, FBI Agent Joanne Miller (Shailene Woodley, Motor City) is frustrated that her linguistics approach to forming a suspect profile isn't being taken seriously enough by the Old Boys Club at the Bureau.
We then flash back to 1958 where a 16-year-old math prodigy Kaczynski (Jacob Tremblay, Room, Wonder, grown up now) is a Harvard freshman who applies to be what he thinks is a philosophical debate club run by professor Henry Murray (Russell Crowe, Virtuosity) and his assistant Christiana Morgan (Annabelle Wallis, Mutiny) who had created the Thematic Apperception Test which is similar to the Rorschach Test in diagnosing mental issues. The club turns out to be series of harsh one-on-one sessions where the young Kaczynski is verbally abused by "Mr. C" (Gus Halper, The Shards), who violates the rules while Kaczynski's responses are filmed and monitored electronically.
Back in the future, Miller is contacted by Kaczynski's estranged brother, David (Matthew Kevin Anderson, Eternity), whose wife believes the Manifesto sounds like stuff Ted has written and he decided to bring her suspicions to the FBI in order to clear Ted. They have been estranged over two decades, but he still worries about his big brother. Miller's superior doesn't think this has merit and forbids her to investigate, so of course she takes a couple days off and travels to Montana to see what she can find.
Meanwhile in the past, young Ted is become more frustrated by the sessions until Morgan finally lets him see behind the curtain as to what the whole process has been about. Ted is outraged at the duplicity and begins to construct a package for Murray that's similar to the bomb package we've been shown.
Unabomber is clearly trying to construct an impression that Murray's experiment and emotional abuse of Ted set him on the path to blowing up a lot of people 20 years later, but doesn't convincingly connect the dots. When doing my usual post-biopic fact check to see how much was true and how much invention, this impression remained unchallenged. Most distractingly is the fact that Miller is an imaginary composite character clearly fashioned to get a women in the cast (during the end credits, real photos of Kaczynski and the FBI agents at his cabin where he was arrested and no women are present) and that David Kaczynski approached the FBI because he did believe Ted was the Unabomber, not trying to clear him. Why change that?
While the performances are all respectable and the insights somewhat provocative, Unabomber is just too flat and too fictitious to be compelling or informational. It lacks necessary boom.
Score: 5/10. Catch it on Netflix.
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