The early part of the film follows the experience of a late 19th-century journalist from Woking, known as "the writer", involved with the landing of a Martian invasion spacecraft.

The film also details the adventures of his brother, a student in London, who accompanies two ladies to the east coast of England in order to escape from the slaughter and destruction wrought by the Martians.

Hines' version was to be set in Seattle, with a Martian attack preceded by neutralizing electromagnetic power; from there the tale's events would unfold and be as similar as possible to Wells' novel.

[citation needed] In a 2004 interview with Scifidimensions.com,[2] Hines stated that after early Microsoft employees and others in the computer industry saw his desktop film, Bug Wars, a package of $42 million was assembled for the updated modern version.

[3] Production began in early September 2001, with plans to move into principal photography by October of that year, with a Halloween 2002 target release date.

[4][2] Two weeks later, with the support of Charles Keller, the director of the H. G. Wells Society, Hines began writing a new script with producer Goforth, while they were filming Pendragon's Chrome.

In a series of questions presented by audiences, Hines claimed that the film never saw a theatrical release due to exhibitors pulling out, either from being bullied by Paramount, or through fear of reprisal from the studio.

In April 2008 Pendragon publicly announced the legal settlement of the matter, stating it "...apologizes for any misconception its press release or later internet poll may have caused".

[13] The film as a whole received generally poor reviews by critics, who, while often praising the good intentions behind the project and its faithfulness to the source material,[14] variously described the result as "unendurable"[15] and "terrible in almost every way a movie can be", with "awful" effects.

The film bases its approach on the 1938 Orson Welles CBS radio Halloween broadcast of War of the Worlds, by presenting itself as a true account of actual events.

[17] Director Timothy Hines said, in reference to this technique, "When Orson Welles broadcast War of the Worlds on the radio in the late 1930s, he presented it in such a way as to not clearly identify that it was a work of fiction.