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‘Unabomber’ Review: A Portrait of the Terrorist as a Young Man, Given a Hokey TV-Movie Gloss

Jacob Tremblay doesn't convince as the teenage Ted Kaczynski in this Netflix filler, which alternates a semi-interesting psychological origin story with a by-the-numbers procedural following his capture.

The Unabomber may be a figure of enduring public fascination, but it’s hard to see that extending to “Unabomber,” Netflix‘s unimaginatively titled and prosaically assembled drama about how domestic terrorist Ted Kaczynski was radicalized, and how he was caught. Alternating between a standard-issue procedural thriller, dramatizing the FBI’s final year of investigation on the case, and psychologically revealing flashbacks to the 16-year-old Kaczynski’s freshman year at Harvard, Janus Metz‘s film has some built-in intrigue from its subject matter alone, but rote dialogue and autopilot true-crime styling do little to fire the imagination. Meanwhile, the dual timelines never spur or inform each other in any meaningful way; the sense that two disparate but half-baked Unabomber projects have been unhappily welded together is hard to shake.

‘Unabomber’ Review: Jacob Tremblay and Russell Crowe in a Facile Rendering of Ted Kaczynski’s College Days

Director Janus Metz's thriller, also starring Shailene Woodley, attempts to plumb the depths of a pivotal moment in the infamous murderer’s life — his time as a Harvard student.

While Netflix has Ryan Murphy busy investigating (or flat-out making up) the motives of killers like Jeffery Dahmer, the Menendez Brothers and Lizzie Borden, the streamer has enlisted director Janus Metz to tell the story of Ted Kaczynski, the math prodigy turned reclusive murderer known as the Unabomber — also the movie’s title. But Unabomber, written by Sam Chalsen and Nelson Greaves, is not some sweeping birth-to-death survey of Kaczynski’s life. It instead focuses on a young Kaczynski’s time at Harvard University, where he participated in a brutal psychological study that, in the movie’s framing, may have helped form the anarchic worldview that eventually led to his infamous deeds.

Review: Netflix’s ‘Unabomber’ Can’t Even Do True Crime Right

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To the modern true-crime aficionado, the Unabomber must present an intriguing dilemma. To those of us who were around during his yearslong campaign of bombings and his subsequent capture, he’s a figure just familiar and haunting enough that we come to the story with a mixture of anticipation and preconception. (I once had a professor who’d lost a hand to one of the Unabomber’s explosives; proximity to a victim tends to render the perpetrator uniquely terrifying — and maybe also a little fascinating.) To later generations, though, he might not seem as fearsome as some of the grislier, more hands-on serial killers, the demon cannibals and psycho snatchers who regularly inspire suburban nightmares and streaming miniseries. No, the Unabomber, a onetime math genius and professor named Ted Kaczynski, was basically a hermit nerd in a Montana cabin who mailed bombs to scientists, engineers, professors, and other elites. In that sense, he was more a terrorist than a serial killer — a deadly lunatic with an agenda who killed three and injured dozens. And his agenda (once he deigned to reveal it, following years of terrorizing and murdering his fellow humans) was greeted by some as a compelling one: The 1995 publication of Kaczynski’s 35,000-word manifesto, Industrial Society and Its Future, captured the imagination of many a neo-Luddite writer and thinker. (Perhaps ironically, growing interest in his anti-tech treatise was helped along by the internet, which began expanding into everyday life around the same time.)

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