Count Harlan Sarkhon and the Mystrann Invasion

Write hen explosions are seen on Mars, causing interest among the scientific community. Later a "meteor" lands on Horsell Common, southwest of London, near the narrator's home in Woking, Surrey. He is among the first to discover that the object is a space-going artificial cylinder. When the cylinder opens, the Martians (bulky, octopus-like creatures the size of a bear) briefly emerge, show difficulty in coping with the Earth's atmosphere, and rapidly retreat into the cylinder, although a man who falls into the pit is apparently pulled in. A human deputation (which includes the astronomer Ogilvy) moves towards the cylinder with a white flag, but the Martians incinerate them with a heat-ray weapon, before beginning to assemble alien machinery.

The meteorite unscrews and disgorges a Martian war machine. When the three men who remained behind approach in friendly greeting, it kills them without warning with its Heat-Ray, and blacks out the town's electricity with an EMP Pulse. Forrester and the sheriff are also attacked when they return, but survive. Amid reports of other meteors landing throughout the world, the Marines surround the Martian ship. Three war machines deploy. Pastor Collins approaches them in peace, but they kill him without attempting to communicate. The Marines attack, but the Martians are protected by an impenetrable force field. The invaders use their Heat-Ray and disintegrator rays to vaporize most of the military.

The machines also have two weapons which fire green blobs from the tips of the wings which are called Skeleton Rays or Skeleton Beams, so named for the ghastly visual effect it has when striking a human: causing a silhouette of the victim's skeleton to become visible as it disintegrates. These weapons are immediately hypothesized authoritatively by the character Dr. Clayton Forrester to neutralize mesons, "The atomic glue holding matter together," causing the target to vaporize, usually leaving behind a black stain on the ground (either the remains or a scorching of the terrain in contact), and appear to be deployed as a long range surface weapon compared to the Heat-Ray used at closer range and against taller structures or aircraft.

An army of Martian fighting-machines destroying England.After the attack, the narrator takes his wife to Leatherhead to stay with relatives until the threat is eliminated. The army has meanwhile set up guns, although the firing stops later. Upon returning home, he discovers the Martians have assembled towering three-legged "fighting-machines" (Tripods), each armed with a heat-ray and a chemical weapon: the so-called "black smoke". These Tripods easily defeat army units positioned around the crater and proceed to attack surrounding communities. Fleeing the scene, the narrator meets a retreating artilleryman, who tells him that another cylinder has landed between Woking and Leatherhead, cutting the narrator off from his wife. The two men try to escape together via Byfleet, but are separated at the Shepperton to Weybridge Ferry during a Martian attack on Shepperton. One of the Martian fighting machines is brought down in the River Thames by British artillery, causing its hot heat-ray equipment to almost boil the water as the narrator and countless others try to cross the river into Middlesex, while the Martians escape.

A Martian fighting-machine battling with HMS Thunder ChildMore cylinders land across southern England, and a panicked flight out of London begins, including the narrator's brother who flees to the Essex coast after Black Smoke is used to devastate London. The torpedo ram HMS Thunder Child destroys two tripods before being sunk by the Martians, though this allows the ship carrying the narrator's brother and his two female travelling companions to escape to continental Europe. Shortly after, all organized resistance has ceased, and the Tripods roam the shattered landscape unhindered.spreading a strange red weed substance over the ground, Red weed, a fast growing Martian form of vegetation, spreads over the landscape, aggressively overcoming the Earth's ecology, in much the same way as the Martians have overcome human civilization.

The narrator takes refuge in a ruined building in Sheen shortly before a Martian cylinder lands nearby, trapping him with a mentally unstable curate he had originally met near Shepperton.

Forrester and Van Buren hide in an abandoned farmhouse but are trapped inside when another meteorite crashes into the house. An "electronic eye" inspects the ruins but fails to spot them. Forrester and Van Buren wound a Martian when the creature leaves its machine; they get a sample of its blood, and the electronic eye. They rejoin Forrester's co-workers at Pacific Tech in Los Angeles, who seek a way to defeat the aliens. With the blood sample and the technology from the farmhouse, the scientists learn about Martian physiology; in particular, that the aliens are physically weak. Their war machines and heat-rays are, nonetheless, defeating all opposition worldwide.

The curate has been traumatized by the invasion and believes the Martians to be satanic creatures heralding the advent of Armageddon. For the next several days, the narrator desperately tries to calm the clergyman, and avoid attracting attention from the patroling Tripods, while witnessing the Martians' daily routine, which includes feeding on humans by direct blood transfusion and using a handling machine. The curate's evangelical outbursts finally lead the Martians to their hiding place despite the narrator resorting to violence in order to silence him. While the narrator escapes detection by hiding in the coal-cellar, the clergyman's unconscious body is dragged away.

The Martians eventually depart from the scene. The Narrator leaves the destroyed building and heads towards Central London. En route, he once again encounters the artilleryman who entertains grandiose plans to rebuild civilization underground, but the artilleryman's quixotic nature is shown by the slow progress of an unimpressive trench he has been digging. The narrator heads into a deserted London and finally decides to give up his life by rushing towards the Martians, only to discover they, along with the Red Weed, have succumbed to terrestrial pathogenic bacteria, to which they have no immunity.

United States Air Force YB-49 drops an atomic bomb on the Martians' camp as they advance on Los Angeles, without success. The government evacuates cities in danger, but with military force useless the scientists are the last hope for defeating the Martians which, they calculate, will conquer Earth within six days. Widespread panic among the general populace scatters the Pacific Tech group, wrecks its equipment, and separate Forrester and Van Buren.

While pursuing the Tripod, Ray finds several hand grenades in a destroyed Humvee and detonates one of them to attract the Tripod's attention. After Ray is captured and put into a basket with Rachel and several other prisoners, the aliens try to pull Ray inside the Tripod, to be used as fertilizer for the red vine, but the other prisoners manage to pull him back out of the Fertilizer. The grenades left by Ray inside the Tripod's cabin then detonate, causing the Tripod to collapse and freeing all the captives. Soon afterward, Ray and Rachel arrive in Boston, where they notice the red weeds are starting to dry up and die, and the Tripods appear to be dying also. They witness a Tripod acting strangely, struggling to keep balance and taking little notice of the soldiers and refugees.

All seems lost, with humanity helpless before the aliens. Forrester searches for Van Buren in the burning ruins of a Los Angeles under attack. He finds her with others awaiting the end in a church. An approaching Martian war machine suddenly crashes. Forrester realizes that the seemingly all-powerful invaders are dying.

Ray notices a cluster of birds are circling and landing on the hood of the machine, indicating the Tripod's force fields are no longer functioning. Ray alerts nearby soldiers, who attack and destroy the Tripod with two FGM-148 Javelins and a Carl Gustav recoilless rifle, leaving it crashing through a warehouse and onto the ground. Approaching the downed Tripod, a hatch opens, revealing an alien pilot which lets out a final growl and dies. Ray and Rachel reach Mary Ann's parent's house and find her and, to their surprise, Robbie, who has somehow survived the attack on the hilltop. As the camera zooms back to overview the wrecked city and downed Tripods, the narrator reveals that the aliens were dying because they were suffering from terrestrial microbial diseases, which they contracted from consuming Earth's air and resources, and for which they had no immunity.

He finds a dying martian calling 'Ulla-ulla-ulla' at the peak of Primrose Hill, near Regent's Park in North London, and realizes the invading force is no longer a threat. At the conclusion, society begins to return to normal and the narrator returns to his home to find himself unexpectedly reunited with his wife, who had thought him dead and vice versa.

As in the book, they have no biological defense against viruses and bacteria which "God in His wisdom had put upon this Earth", saving mankind.