The latest Netflix movie, “Unabomber,” starts off with a bang—literally. In the opening sequence, a package arrives in the mail. The wife hands the mystery package to her husband, who takes it to the other room to open it. As he opens it, the package explodes, killing him and injuring his wife and daughter. The biopic, about the infamous Unabomber Ted Kaczynski, then cuts to newsreels of an unidentified person sending explosives through the mail, targeting tech workers and scientists. Of course a story like this appeals to Netflix since the company has many shows and documentaries about a variety of serial killers, including prior documentaries on Kaczynski himself.
From here, the story splits into two threads: one of the FBI hunt in 1995 and the other with Kaczynski (Jacob Tremblay) as a college student at Harvard. The FBI hunt starts the film off. Recently, Kaczynski’s long manifesto was released in the newspaper, so when the FBI catches an uneducated man, Agent Miller (Shailene Woodley) believes they caught the wrong guy. She is a linguistics specialist and believes the manifesto is the way to catch the perpetrator. Unfortunately, she is brushed off by the rest of the male agents, who use an outdated profile of the Unabomber instead.
The other storyline, the more interesting one, explores Kaczynski’s time at Harvard. His immigrant parents force him to study math, but he is more interested in philosophy. When he hears a lecture by Dr. Henry Murray (Russell Crowe), he becomes enamored with him, even more motivated to study philosophy. Kaczynski signs up for an experiment led by Murray and Dr. Christiana Morgan (Annabelle Wallis). Presented as a study exploring philosophical arguments, the study is actually funded by the CIA to see how long it takes to break someone in an argument. Kaczynski is strapped into a chair with many physiological measurements attached while an older student breaks down Ted’s arguments and berates him.
As the story continues to jump back and forth, the writers do very little to connect the past events to the current moment. The FBI hunt is extremely superficial, and the hunt seems to go relatively smoothly for Agent Miller since the film does not explore many events within the 90-minute runtime. Janus Metz, the director, poses the psychological experiments as the only cause behind why Ted Kaczynski became the Unabomber, but the viewer does not even see Kaczynski during the manhunt to compare the younger version with the current version of him. By the end, I’m not sure how we got from the kid at the end of college to a terrorist.
The picture of Kaczynski in this film is incomplete. We only see the young version of him. After Harvard, he went to another school as well, and he eventually became a professor for a little while before starting his terrorist campaign. That is a large gap in time for Kaczynski to form his philosophy against technology. Just like the other Netflix series about serial killers, the writers make up many aspects of the story. The most glaring falsification is the center of the story—Dr. Murray and Kaczynski never had a relationship and barely met during the psychological experiments.
After finishing the film, I was left wondering why this was made. Jacob Tremblay shines as a younger Kaczynski, showing a descent into madness from a shy boy. Russell Crowe also gave a solid performance as well. The psychological moments during the experiment were entertaining, but the FBI hunt lacked intrigue. “Unabomber” ends up being any other passable Netflix film without much to say despite a promising premise.
Final Verdict: Stream It (3/5)
Senior Ranon Travers is a Staff Writer. His email is rtravers@fandm.edu.