Could have been a much better update

Rating: 3/10 (9 July 2009)

Chances are no one will read this review, but I'll still put in my two bits. As many other reviews have stated, the characters are terrible and there isn't a likable one in the bunch. Unfortunately as a science fiction update it suffers terribly as well. The 1953 original was built on a more solid premise, and this film is just laughable by comparison. This is before we consider just how much more we expect out of a sci fi film in 2005.
Right from the outset, the narrator tells us how the aliens had been greedily watching our planet with eyes on its resources. We then find out that the alien tripods had been buried here hundreds or thousands of years ago in preparation for an attack. This begs the question, if they wanted our planet so badly, why did they deliver their military hardware and then wait centuries for us to develop technology with which to fight back? Of course that still leaves the unlikely fact that no one ever found any of the tripods, despite being buried beneath cities that had cropped up over the intervening time. Apparently those utilities and subway systems were never dug quite deep enough.
The aliens themselves are tactically incompetent and the humans fighting them aren't much better. When a human with high powered grenades is hucking them at one, what does it do? Naturally it picks him up and brings him inside its shield where he can actually hurt it. More, their shields don't even protect them (or their feet) from below, not that anyone thought to deploy a field of antitank mines ahead of them.
Even from a cinematic standpoint, the clashes between the humans and the aliens fail. It's all by the numbers, viewed from the periphery. Fifty years earlier the original film managed to create much more exhilarating battle scenes. Here though, the depth of the tooth and nail struggle is lost despite vastly improved special effects.
As far as staying true to the source material, there was a major point they should have changed. The aliens falling to Earth born microbes was ridiculous. Certainly a hundred years ago it was a new and fresh idea, but in the modern world it doesn't make any sense. We didn't go to the moon without quarantining our people for two weeks. The idea that these aliens would even be running their ships without an environmental seal is nuts. Independence Day may have had its faults, but in the modern age, a computer virus is way more plausible.