I agree with you Karlos, my introduction to Sci-Fi literature was reading War of The Worlds whilst doing a primary school project on the Jeff Wayne album. A long love affair with Sci-Fi was born and continues to this very day.
I'd much rather have seen Spielberg shoot the movie truer to it's Victorian Britain roots, the novel itself is a very illuminating social commentary on the late 19th century, with such novelties as poison gas, ballistic weaponry and mass devastation being described in horryfying detail twenty years before the imagery came to life in Flanders and the Somme. In it's modern context, it's just another alien invasion movie that pays homage to Independance Day and the lesser known John Christopher novel The Tripods (the scene where Cruise incpacitates a tripod with a hand grenade is lifted straight from the text of Christopher's 1968 work). As a further thought, Christopher's triolgy makes much more sense to film in a modern context than WOTW - seeing as the premise of The Tripods is that it's set in the future when humanity has shunned technology in favour of an agrarian existence.
In fact, I think The Tripods would make an excellent dramatisation (memories of ropey BBC special effects aside).
