The 1898 science fiction classic that inspired this movie was also called War Of The Worlds. The book was a first; never before had anyone in the still nascent science fiction genre, written about an alien invasion on earth. A massive piece de resistance, the story carried the underlying social message of humility for the then sprawling and invulnerable British Empire. What it also did was spawn a culture, a sensibility, a hypnotic legend of great power, a genre.
It was inevitable for a filmmaker of such a legend-spawning stature of today to take up the story of another vanguard....