This series charts the FBI's attempt to capture the elusive "Unabomber", a domestic terrorist who killed 3 and wounded 23 people through mail bombs. With eight episodes and a combined runtime of around 8 hours, the series obviously delves into the lives of all the people involved in the investigation, but is mainly told through the perspective of James R. Fitzgerald, who is an FBI criminal profiler.
Sam Worthington plays the role of Fitzgerald, and the Unabomber Ted Kaczynski is played by Paul Bettany. Both of these actors rose to fame through the Avatar and Marvel franchises respectively. Both of them are strong in their performance, especially Bettany, who steals the show with his engrossed performance.
The back and forth editing looks a bit shady, and the creators of the show simply abandon that approach around halfway of the show, which feels weird. The pace also slows down a bit in the middle part of the series. And there are a few "investigation" cliches that are seen. The main problem of the series is that it can't balance between the investigation stories and the courtroom stories, often ignoring one for the other. A more linear approach to the story would've been better.
However, the series is definitely one of the better investigation series on the internet, and is definitely worth the eight hours of watching it. If you are still not convinced, watch the first episode, and I think Paul Bettany will do the rest.
Eh....I really don't know how much of this movie is true. How many people are amalgamations. Some of the people depicted, especially the FBI agents, they seem too much to be true, too much a caricature, too good to be true. Too much in general, it sort of leads you to believe that the only character that was real was the Unabomber himself.
That being the case, it IS a series about catching the killer, and I've always believed that was the more interesting part of the serial killer movie fetish thing.
The killers have it easy. They have 323 Million people to hide out in.
The people that catch them, on the other hand, have it a lot harder, they literally have to find the needle in the haystack and, with a case like the Unabomber that haystack was the entire United States.
So, they did do a very good job of conveying that little detail, and that alone is worth watching. And, they did it without the NCIS overly techno-babble take on crime fighting that, for the most part, is too expensive to use if it even exists.
So, what you get to do is sit back and watch people solve a deadly serious puzzle. And the details of how they fit all the pieces together is displayed in an extremely believable way.
My only problem, the only thing that made me give it 6 stars is that, yeah, most of the characters didn't seem real. But, that is easy to get beyond because, this series is all in the how, not in the who.
