In the book, humans initially gave a fair account of themselves, and a number of Martian war machines fell to human weapons. What turned the war to the Martian's favor was their deployment of a deadly gas, and the ability to disperse it by air vehicle. This tactic doesn't make it into many movies.

Human technology has advanced, and the original Martians would have been easily wiped out by human weapons by the time the 1950s George Pal film was made, so they added force fields to the Martian arsenal, and "beams of force" to support the war machines instead of articulated legs, to keep the special effects guys from leaping for the director's throat.

The "lightning" tranporters was a weird touch, but probably necessary. Huge cylinders landing in smoking craters a half mile across would have brought the military into it right away, and the dramatic first scenes would not have been possible.

The rest stuck to the book pretty well, including the wrecked house surrounded by a Martian base, the Martians drinking blood, the humans carried around in baskets, Tim Robbins taking the curate's role of fanatic noisemaker,

Did anyone else think that the crowd around the hole in the street was a bit blase, even for New Yorkers? If I had been there, I would have been halfway to the next area code after the first crack opened up.

The tendency of Ray to keep hauling his family to large centers of population was also a bit weird. When the balloon goes up, you don't head for the cities. The last place I would have gone under those circumstances, for example, was that ferry landing. God knows why anyone thought they'd be safe on a brilliantly-lit boat in the middle of a river with war machines standing right there, but panic has its own logic.