No, I haven't read the book. I was comparing the movie to the original from the 1950's. In that movie, Gene Barry was heroic, trying to organize a fight against the Martians. And there was a romance plot between him and a woman, quite absent from the new movie which portrays a dysfunctional divorced family.
Besides that, the new movie was plain stupid. The Martians supposedly buried thousands of ships underground a million years ago (conveniently in the cities we built later), and come back and pop into them in order to attack us? If they were here a million years ago, they would still be here and we wouldn't. And they would have terraformed the Earth to their liking back then (something they are trying to do in the movie present-day). And we never discovered a single ship, despite building lots of skyscrapers in the cities (we dig pretty deep for them, and it would be stupid to bury the Martian ships too deep). Also, our military is lobbing ordnance at the head of the tri-pod Martian ships, to no effect. Hello, blow out the earth under their legs and they crash to the ground!
Real bad logic in this movie.
This movie wasn't a remake of the 1953 version but an adaptation of the novel. The points you make about plot holes don't really apply to this movie which is concerned with nothing more then generating tension. The novel doesn't give any information about the aliens either except that they were from Mars. The novel and this movie version are about the societal collapse and sheer terror that comes from some massive calamity. It succeeds on that front. The technological details and logical gaps are largely irrelevant in this dream like context. Much less so then they were in a 'Who-Done-It' like Minority Report.