Theodore “Ted” Kaczynski, the so-called “Unabomber”, was the subject of the FBI’s longest and most expensive investigation, triggered by his mail bombing campaign which killed three people and injured 23 more between 1978 and 1995 (the name "Unabomber" was derived from "university and airline bomber"). A gifted but apparently insane academic, Kaczynski earned a PhD in mathematics and held several prominent university posts before veering off the grid and retreating to an isolated shack in Montana. His 35,000 word manifesto, Industrial Society and its Future, advanced his theory that technology was destroying individual freedom, and was published in the New York Times and the Washington Post in 1995.
It’s a bizarre, sinister and fascinating story, but sadly the same cannot be said for Janus Metz’s film. Much of the weight falls on the slender shoulders of Jacob Tremblay (he turns 20 on October 5), who plays the student Kaczynski with a sort of foot-stamping petulance which begins to grate quite rapidly. Screenwriters Sam Chalsen and Nelson Greaves have largely boiled down his education to a prolonged confrontation between himself and Harvard professor Henry Murray (Russell Crowe), who teaches philosophy, is very hung up on the works of Herman Melville, and wants to lure the young Theodore away from maths and into his own discipline.
Ted’s parents, especially his dad, are livid that he’s being diverted from the ordered and logical world of mathematics and algebra into philosophical fairyland, but Ted is evidently bursting with all sorts of apocalyptic ideas about mankind, free will and other stuff. Anyway his dad’s only a sausage-maker in Chicago, so what does he know?
The narrative introduces the theme – all true, apparently – that Professor Murray is using Kaczynski as a guinea-pig in mind-control experiments, inspired by American survivors of the Korean war who had been captured and brainwashed by the North Koreans. Murray wants to prove scientifically that anyone can be psychologically broken, partly by the use of older students playing the role of hostile and intimidating interrogators, but Kaczynski merely becomes more and more stubborn and idiosyncratic.
However, apart from an introductory scene of an unwitting victim obliterating himself by triggering a mail bomb, the film makes no effort to depict the extent of Kaczynski’s terror campaign, which consequently means we don’t feel much involvement with the FBI’s investigations. There’s lots of dramatic music on the soundtrack but hardly any drama on the screen, and the way the story is structured gives little sense of the narrative stretching over decades. Shailene Woodley (pictured above) plays FBI agent Joanne Miller, who manages to prise some significant clues out of Ted’s brother David, but even when she identifies Ted’s tumbledown shack in Nowheresville, it feels merely anticlimactic rather than a dazzling moment of plot-revelation. At the end of it all, Kaczynski is still enigmatic and unknowable.
