When Jeffrey Dahmer was in high school, he convinced his classmates to take a private tour of the White House.During the tour, he met Vice President Walter Mondale.Before Charles Manson became a famous cult leader and killed nine people, he was a songwriter who wrote a song called "Cease to Exist." The Beach Boys recorded it under the title "Never Learn Not to Love."
It seems that many of history's most notorious figures had interesting and unusual encounters with famous people.
Future generations might find it hard to believe that Donald Trump was in movies like "Home Alone 2," "The Little Rascals," and Woody Allen's "Celebrity." But actually, current generations already find it surprising.
Since people love biopics, it makes sense that filmmakers want to use these strange stories.
For example, the story of Jeffrey Dahmer meeting Walter Mondale appears in the 2017 movie "My Friend Dahmer." The Charles Manson and Beach Boys story is featured in a 1990 TV movie called "Summer Dreams." It's likely that someone will make a movie about how all of Donald Trump's bad actions somehow relate to his performance in the comedy "Ghosts Can't Do It," which won a Razzie Award.
Netflix's new thriller "Unabomber" tells the true story of Ted Kaczynski, who sent bombs to people across the country, killing three and injuring many others between 1978 and 1995.
His actions led to a nationwide manhunt that ended when his brother called the FBI.This was a big deal, so the movie adds extra scenes to make the story longer.
The film is split into two parts.
The first half is set in the mid-1990s, where FBI Agent Joanne Miller (Shailene Woodley) investigates a lead that almost seems too easy.The second half takes place 30 years earlier, when a young Ted Kaczynski (Jacob Tremblay) participated in a psychological experiment led by Harvard professor Henry Murray, who created a theory called "Personology."
Henry Murray isn't like the Beach Boys or Macaulay Culkin, and he certainly isn't Walter Mondale.
But the movie emphasizes this detail a lot.Murray is shown psychologically experimenting on young Kaczynski, and the film tries to suggest that Kaczynski's violent behavior started because of this.However, the connection is not very strong.No matter how hard the director tries to link the two, half of the movie feels like a footnote that needs cutting.
Jacob Tremblay does a great job playing young Kaczynski, showing his intelligence, insecurity, and loneliness.
This helps the audience briefly believe that Kaczynski’s crimes might have been avoided.Russell Crowe, who plays Murray, plays the role like a companion to his role as Hermann Göring in the film "Nuremberg," where he portrayed a Nazi war criminal who was psychoanalyzed.Crowe seems to enjoy playing smug, manipulative characters and he does it well.
Shailene Woodley, on the other hand, is stuck with a script that doesn't know what to do with her.
The film creates clear parallels between Agent Miller and young Kaczynski, showing them both as smart people who resent their bosses.When Kaczynski yells at his father and criticizes him for acting smarter, it feels like a mirror of Miller’s struggles with her supervisors.In the end, both Kaczynski and Miller break the rules to achieve their goals.
The film's biggest issue is that these unclear connections don't add up.
Kaczynski stands up for himself and becomes a terrorist.Miller never does, but she catches the Unabomber, so the message remains: we should tolerate fools.
That’s a tough sell.
Perhaps the idea is that so-called “experts” should pay attention to smart young people, but one of those young people turned into the Unabomber, which doesn’t make much sense.There's a difference between recognizing a pattern and acting on it, and the Unabomber never got to the acting part.
Is *Unabomber* a true crime thriller?
A psychological profile?A story about a supervillain’s rise?The movie never settles on one.What it does best is overhype a story that’s almost nothing, while underplaying a manhunt that breaks standard storytelling rules, which was already hard to make exciting.It ends up with two weak parts that don’t really add up.Some actors try really hard to make the story interesting, and the composer, Marco Beltrami, gives his all with a powerful, intense score that almost hides the film’s flaws.But in the end, there’s no way around it: *Unabomber* is a disappointment.
