Kevin's observations about the
book to movie change:

The novel has two major points of views about the attack. A scientific view (there are flares, they've coming to Earth, watch out). And there's a religious view (We're under attack. Let's hope we survive. Let's hope humanity will survive). The movie credits don't seem to have a curator (priest) character, and the book kills off Ogilvy almost immediately. Presumably, having Tim Robbins in the movie as the scientist, they'll give him some decent scientific lines to say.

The novel is set in London, 1898 including various towns in the Thames River valley; Spielberg is updating it to modern day Bayonne, NJ, a small town outside New York City.

The Martians are not human like. They have long tentacles like octupus. They control tripods (attack vehicles armed with a heat ray). Red weed grows amok and destroys them. They brought it with them. The Martians unload cylinders (six in all) and a tripod guards them as they land in a pit of their own velocity like a sentinel.

The novel follows how the narrator experience first-hand the invasion, his wife and thoughts about his wife who gets separated from him during the attacks, a couple of astronomers, an Army guy who tells him about the offensive, a curator who offers hope, but soon dies. The narrator is left alone. to make it more compelling as a movie, Spielberg has two children in jeopardy and the lousy father who must redeem himself saving his family and reuniting with his ex-wife who bailed out. now her's found his humnaity she'll beg him to come back and live happily ever after? In a war of the worlds (one good, the other indifferent to your lifestyle or right to exist) the only thing you can do is survive.