Avaliações do Metacritic

A tightly scripted cautionary tale about what happens when the lights go down in Southern California, hiding behind a generic action-thriller title.

Koepp's film examines the interconnections between man and the electronic society, and the terrors that are unleashed once those connections are severed, and does so in a wholly original and unnerving manner.

Until he wraps things up much too neatly and idealistically, Koepp puts together a sturdy and efficient thriller.

A sleek, intelligent thriller.

Despite conflicted circumstances, the cast is capable, but there's a feeling of loose ends, an overall lack of cohesiveness to this good-looking film. The Trigger Effect is on-target when it comes to the ills of modern society but is charged with ambivalence as to what makes a hero.

Directed with a spare look and exceptional crispness and precision, The Trigger Effect ultimately falls back on the familiar, especially in its banal ideas of how Matt and Annie are changed by their experience. But during the three-day emergency that it describes, this cleverly made film sustains a spooky intensity and an insinuating, utterly confident style.

To the extent that The Trigger Effect is intended as a tense, somewhat nerve-wracking thriller, it's adequate, and certainly better than the formula-driven likes of The Hand that Rocks the Cradle.

David Koepp's writing-helming bow is a bleak, highly stylized view of modern civilization. While The Trigger Effect maintains a potent mood of postmodern dread, even its proponents will be wondering what all the queasy fuss was about.

The Trigger Effect enjoys bursts of energy as people confront each other in low-budget groups of twos and threes, but it never becomes the subtly powerful experience Koepp was clearly after.

Once the movie settles down to story, it turns out to play like an extended Twilight Zone episode that merely reiterates the theme of the first few minutes: that man is fundamentally a beast and he must struggle endlessly against his own worst instincts and that each victory over those instincts is merely provisional.