As someone who grew up in the 1990s and watches a lot of true crime stories, the Unabomber has always been a subject of morbid fascination for me. Who he was was a mystery for years, and there have been numerous movies, TV shows, and documentaries that have explored Ted Kaczynski’s horrendous crimes and the sprawling investigation to identify him. I’ve watched a lot of them. There is a new Russell Crowe movie that you’ll be able to watch with your Netflix subscription about Kaczynski that delves into something I think has too often been glossed over in most. It’s a villain origin story that could be as interesting as it is distressing.
Where Did The Unabomber Come From?
The movie, simply called Unabomber, which will land on the 2026 movie schedule on September 25th, isn’t about Kaczynski’s terroristic bombing campaign (though that does come up, of course). It also isn’t focused on the investigation to find him. Those are the subjects that have been explored from every angle. Instead, Unabomber tells Kaczynski’s origin story, focusing on his time as a math student at Harvard.
Kaczynski’s time at Harvard is something that is usually mentioned in anything about the mass murderer who took his own life in prison in 2023. It rarely gets more than just that: a mention. He’s usually described as smart, but not really a standout student. He was also only 16 when he first entered the prestigious university, which meant he wasn’t the most popular person on campus. That’s kind of all that is really said about him at that time in his life. This true crime movie should show a lot more.
Unabomber Is About Kaczynski’s Time In A Study By An Infamous Professor
During his time at Harvard, Kaczynski participated in some of the human behavior experiments conducted by notorious professor Henry Murray (played by Crowe here). Like other unethical experiments in the ‘60s, Murray ran some psychological studies that really stressed the participants in them. They aren’t as infamous as the Stanford Prison Experiment or the Milgram Experiment at Yale around the same time, but they are just as controversial.
In an article in The Atlantic in 2000, writer Alston Chase described the experiment as:
Intended to measure how people react under stress. Murray subjected his unwitting students, including Kaczynski, to intensive interrogation—what Murray himself called ‘vehement, sweeping, and personally abusive’ attacks, assaulting his subjects’ egos and most-cherished ideals and beliefs.
This time was touched on in the 2017 TV series Manhunt: Unabomber. Murray was played by Brian d'Arcy James, and Paul Bettany portrayed the Unabomber, but it doesn’t go into a lot of the details, certainly not as much as this movie likely will. It does insinuate that Kaczynski was deeply traumatized by the experience, but at the time of that series’ release, Kaczynski himself said that wasn’t accurate.
How much Murray’s experiments affected him, we’ll likely never know, but this movie is going to do a deep dive into that era. Crowe has taken on some interesting roles lately, including playing Hermann Göring in Nuremberg last year. This is another controversial figure (and on a far different scale, granted), and it should be fascinating to watch.
