Ted K

The Unabomber was coming up with fascinating ideas on society from as early as the 1970's and as time goes by, those ideas become more prescient and more true. So, how does this film go about exploring these great insights into society? How does this film explore the intellect of its subject? The sad answer is, it ignores it.

Ted K, was a fantastic opportunity to do something intellectually stimulating, but for some reason, a choice was made to ignore the intelligence and make the story about a crazy hobo who lives in the forest, struggles with sexual frustration and makes mail bombs because he can't find a girlfriend.

If I were conspiratorial, I could easily imagine the powerful overlords of our society were getting so worried about people reading the Unabomber's manifesto, that they set out to destroy his character by making this film.

The film is competently produced and Sharlto Copley's performance is strong; the problem is the approach. This film didn't attempt to study Ted Kaczynski's character, they set out to assassinate it.

Loved the veer away from the 'American cop show' approach, letting us uncomfortably live in Ted's environment. Sharlto Copeley is excellent, believable and disturbing. Arthouse style, assumes a knowledge, loved it.

The screenplay was terrible - it felt like it got lost trying to figure out if it wants to be a documentary or a movie. Tony Stone's directing made matters worse with very little substance and a whole lot of filler to fill in the run-time. The endless NatGeo scenes of nature, animals and wilderness just bored me and was all irrelevant to the story. Ya we get it, he's an off-grid guy. Then, all the interesting parts - the guts of Ted K's story, were weak, too short and lacked much needed insight and impact. This all could've just been condensed into a 20-30 min short docu-story. Aside from Sharlto Copley's decent performance, this film was a boring sloth and rather pointless.

I would recommend people read some of the NY Times, NY Magazine, ABC News pieces looking into Kaczynski's own writings and statements to friends. This would make it clear that the simplistic analysis in this film as well as many other shallow treatments of his views/rationalizations ignore the clear evidence that Kaczynski was an anarchist, climate activism terrorist, and if classifiable at all, would be far left.

This bizarre treatment him as some kind of incel is simply not fact based.

I've previously watched the excellent series Manhunt: Unabomber so felt compelled to see this through. It's factual but very very slow and light on detail about Ted K's targets and focusses far too much on his backwoodsman lifestyle imo.

Nevertheless a fascinating story about the largest manhunt in FBI history even though we get to see very little of it.