Film Pick of the Week: Unabomber - review by Yvette Huddleston
Unabomber Netflix, review by Yvette Huddleston
True crime is among the most watched content across broadcast and digital media, so it is no surprise that Netflix has taken on the story of real-life American terrorist Ted Kaczynski aka the Unabomber whose parcel bomb attacks in the United States between 1978 and 1995 killed three people and injured 23 others. His terror campaign targeted companies and individuals that he believed were advancing modern technology and thereby posing a threat to humanity and to the natural environment. Arrested and jailed for life in 1996, he died in prison in 2023.
With a dual timeline, this dramatisation directed by Danish director Janus Metz Pedersen, splits its focus between Kaczynski’s early life as an exceptionally gifted young mathematician studying at Harvard University in the mid-1960s, and the efforts of a team of FBI officers to track him down and arrest him in the 1990s. The film opens as a fresh-faced 16-year-old Kaczynski (played by Jacob Tremblay), the son of working class Polish immigrants and the first of his family to go to university, arrives at Harvard to begin his studies in mathematics. While there he comes under the influence of charismatic professor of psychology Henry Murray (Russell Crowe) who is conducting a series of experiments which he claims will enable participants to develop and share their own philosophy - Kaczynski is very keen to become a philosopher - but in reality, commissioned by the CIA, are for more sinister purposes. Kaczynski is portrayed as outwardly confident in his ability but shy, socially awkward, naive and vulnerable.
In the 1990s segments of the narrative, FBI agent Joanne Miller (Shailene Woodley) and her colleagues are getting close to the Unabomber after more than a decade and a half trying to track him down. The Unabomber has sent a manifesto to various media outlets requesting its publication and a decision has been made by some major newspapers to publish it. The hope is that someone will recognise something in the way that the manifesto is written and come forward. Miller’s theory that linguistics is the key to finding their man is at odds with those of some of her fellow federal agents - Leo Driver (Alexander Ludwig) in particular who dismisses it - but she is eventually proved right. Soon the team are able to follow leads that point to a reclusive loner who has been living off-grid in seclusion in a remote cabin in the woods in Montana.