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Our society is so dependent on electricity so that when there is a blackout we despair. We find it hard to understand how people survived without the light switch, the TV, the refrigerator. The Trigger Effect is about such an occurence, but whereas our electricity usually comes back in a matter of hours, this movie's characters have to survive in the black for days. It is an interesting premise but it's horribly handled.

The characters we are shown are boring and two dimensional. An uneventful love triangle begins between the three leads which leads to nowhere. There are some interesting parts to the movie but it's let down by it's small budget. This movie demanded some cutting edge movie making, it fails to deliver. This could and should have been a much more (dare I say) violent picture. It's theme was that of man's devolution back into nature after it loses its use of technology. So we expect some nasty events to occur. It never happens.

A movie like this should have left the moviegoer with questions. How would you react in such a situation? Instead it only leaves us with a gaping mouth and a statement to the filmmakers. Stop ruining good ideas!!

I was one of the people who ended up "hating" this movie and wishing it weren't so. As others have said, it's an "important" concept - how would YOU behave in this oh-too-probably situation, but it was so poorly executed. All of the characters in this movie were sooooooo unpleasant, so unlikeable. Are all middle-class Americans really like this? Somehow I doubt it. With a good director and better actors - and let's face it, has Elisabeth Shue ever done any movie where she gets to keep her clothes on - this could have been much better than the 'C' grade crap that it ultimately became.

The reason why I purchased this movie was because last year we had a power outage that lasted 2+ days for us. Some people in our area didn't have power for almost a week. I heard about the movie from a friend of mine that suggested it due to the event that we experienced. Due to us getting the movie shortly after the experience, I found it to be very entertaining and very close to what could happen to "civil" people if they were hit with such a situation for an extended period of time. It hit close to home for me and made me think about how dependent we our of good ole fashion electricity. If you want to see a movie that will give you a slice of what could happen when the power goes out then you will definitely want to see this film. Just think if your city goes without power. You then have no TV, you can't use your debit card, you have no heat or air conditioning depending on the season, no computer, no light at night, and that's just the beginning. When we had our outage we could at least get in the car and go to the mall and have lunch or whatever but if the WHOLE city goes down for a significant amount of time, then there's definitely going to be trouble on the way. And that's what this movie is basically about. Good, entertaining, and recommended for all...

One of those movies that could have been good, if Alfred Hitchcock was still alive. Everybody was in a bad mood anyway if the opening scenes were anything to go by. The opening scenes were good, by the way, which was one reason I kept watching, but to no avail. I agree, it gets worse as it goes along, as if the writer had one good idea then didn't know where to go with it, so it didn't go anywhere. If you're about to rent this movie anyway, think about why you've never heard of it.

This morning, as I perused the IMDB bottom 100, I realized that my own personal worst movie ever wasn't there...The Trigger Effect. Now, in retrospect, this was a harsh assessment to make as a teenager, but I still haven't seen anything else -- and this is after YEARS of MST3K -- that has compared to this. A Rod Serling premise delivered with Ed Wood execution -- this was an absolutely pitiful waste of celluloid and a couple of generally decent actors. The Trigger Effect is boring and lame, feeble and implausible, derivative and lousy. It doesn't even qualify in the "so good, it's bad genre"... it's just bad, which is why I rank it below about a hundred other old sci-fi or spy films that at least aspired to a lower standard. The Trigger Effect aims to be a thought-provoking thriller and isn't anything close. Has anyone else noticed that David Koepp (who wrote and directed this, in addition to penning bad scripts for The Lost World and Snake Eyes, to name just two) is the worst well-paid screenwriter in Hollywood?