I believe that another studio is making another version which more closely follws the original novel. It's going to come out at the same time. I think Victorian England vs Mars is a much better premise than Modern America vs Mars.
An authentic War of the Worlds production, set at the height of the Victorian era, would be fascinating for the unusual setting - but I'd hope that the movie would give the invasion a more global treatment than the novel, or even more so than Independence Day. Sure, Britain was the greatest military power at the time. Yet 19th-century artillery and ironclads were clearly no match for the Martians, so we may as well also see them rampaging across Imperial China, or the Wild West, or Zulu country, and witness how different human cultures might react. One assumes the ending is the same everywhere.. in fact, disease might affect the invaders sooner in the tropics than in England.
