The first advantage of this film is how fully it reveals the rat essence of people in panic. The psychology of the crowd is shown with such vile authenticity that I personally began to wish the aliens victory. While the cities function normally, people remain more or less within the framework, but it is necessary to remove the TV, the refrigerator and the cop – and the crowd returns to the Stone Age in one day. I applaud how well this is shown.
The second advantage is that the film is shot quite close to the book, although there is a difference of 100 years in the setting, and the design of aliens is not the same, and children were added, which are not in the original. But the theme of the hero, tirelessly running away from the threat, tripod in the bay, the scene with a probe in the basement, the murder of a mad man by a hero, the unsuccessful battle of the army against aliens on the plain - all this was. The preservation rate of the original I would estimate at 70 percent. This is a good result, the more the changes were sensible. For example, I would not be so interested in watching if the action was left at the turn of the 19th-20th centuries.
There are cons, too. For example, all the cars do not work, and the hero works. The authors did not even intend to explain it. It's just that everyone's not going, and this one's coming. .
Aliens have been preparing an invasion for millions of years, but have not taken care of basic immunity. They were probably fools, they didn’t know there were microbes on Earth. However, this is not the mistake of filmmakers, but H.G. Wells himself, in his time such a thing as vaccinations almost did not exist. I think the director needed to rethink it, but not too much. In his place, I would say that the medicines in the aliens were, but were not effective enough, plus other purely earthly things like the electromagnetic field, weather changes, circadian rhythms and water pollution. This would be both plausible and long enough to avoid direct criticism.
What did the Aliens expect? If they wanted the Earth, they could have taken it back when they started sending tripods. They weren't needed at the time.