In 2023, Shailene Woodley starred in the film To Catch a Killer. In it, she played a law enforcement officer working with the FBI to investigate a string of murders. The suspected killer is assumed to be highly intelligent, with a clear strategy for enacting and covering up their deadly deeds. Despite some reluctance from her colleagues, Woodley's out-of-the-box thinking is what cracks open the case. It is eventually revealed that the killer is hiding out in a rural area, where officers descend, preparing for a standoff.

In 2026, Shailene Woodley stars in the film Unabomber. In it, she plays a law enforcement officer working with the FBI to investigate a string of murders. The suspected killer is assumed to be highly intelligent, with a clear strategy for enacting and covering up their deadly deeds. Despite some reluctance from her colleagues, Woodley's out-of-the-box thinking is what cracks open the case. It is eventually revealed that the killer is hiding out in a rural area, where officers descend, preparing for a standoff.

Save for the fact that the total number of people who have seen To Catch a Killer probably doesn't eclipse four digits, an ambitious lawyer (probably also in desperate need of work) could look for a copyright case against Unabomber screenwriters Sam Chalsen and Nelson Greaves. Then again, the Unabomber killer and extensive FBI manhunt for him is one of the most documented cases in American history, so the finger could be pointed back at the writers of To Catch a Killer for copying real life. In the end, it doesn't really matter, as neither movie has or will instill any passion within an audience likely watching because it was the first thing that appeared on their streaming service home screen.

At the very least, Unabomber passes the Netflix test of staging a major action sequence within the first five minutes. Menacingly, the film opens inside a mailbox, with a random person receiving a mysterious package. The package explodes upon being opened, killing them instantly. They are another victim of the Unabomber, later revealed to be Ted Kaczynski, who killed 3 and injured 23 with this method from 1978-1995. The FBI was clueless about his identity and whereabouts, with their only tip being the killer's 35,000-word manifesto published in several national newspapers. Titled "Industrial Society and Its Future" and free of a single grammatical mistake, Kaczynski illustrated his twisted ideology in this cruel world where machines have become more important than individual autonomy.

In an effort to dig up the root of this mode of thinking, a second timeline set in 1958 is introduced, going back to Ted's years as a sixteen-year-old prodigy at Harvard. Played by Jacob Tremblay, Ted is skinny and awkward, never adjusting to his classes or his peers. Happiness is only achieved when he's under the tutelage of philosophy Professor Henry Murray (Russell Crowe, returning to the Ivy League a few decades after A Beautiful Mind). Ted agrees to participate in a series of mental tests centered around philosophical debates.

For as prepared as Ted is, he's instantly ragebaited by a graduate student who treats the debate as a roast session. Already emotionally unstable, Ted decides to fight fire with fire. His anger does most of the talking, exasperating his views on the weakening value of ideas in the modern world. It's an interesting angle for Chlasen and Graves to take, one that could easily be interpreted as a warning in our increasingly fractured times. Chaos can only breed more chaos, a chain reaction that can lead a generation to believe the only way to silence your enemy is to kill them.

However, those potent ideas don’t fully come alive in this film, buried under so-so acting and/or Janus Metz's direction. A digital sheen robs the richness of both time periods, and the crosscutting between them never feels purposeful. A few chase scenes are horribly staged and edited, coming off as perfunctory excuses for action in this dialogue-heavy story. Excise the later timeline, and those problems are fully solved. We’ve already got several television shows and documentaries about the manhunt for Kaczynski, so it feels like a waste of an opportunity to make only half a commitment to doing something different.

Netflix will release Unabomber on its streaming service on September 25th.