The original story has tremendous atmosphere and drama in it, largely due to the fact that the Martian weapons are *more* advanced than the human weapons of the Victorian era, but not so much more advanced as to make the Martian machines completely invulnerable...and that results in some extraordinary scenes of heroism and self-sacrifice on the part of the less advanced British army and navy that are high points in the story, and tremendously moving. This simply is not possible in the modernized versions of the story, because given how terrible our weapons are now, what with nuclear bombs and jet fighters and missiles, the only way of making the Martian invasion virtually undefeatable is to equip them with invulnerable force fields around their machines....and this effectively means there is no real drama, just a lot of big explosions and destruction. I am delighted that the BBC is setting out to do the story in the original historical era.