My wife and I watched the movie and really enjoyed it. As far as gun content, I actually thought it was gun-neutral, not anti at all. The fact that the protagonist actually OWNS a handgun, and keeps it loaded and locked up (since young children frequent his house--I do the same, FWIW), and grabs it when SHTF, is actually quite refreshing. The part where he loses the gun isn't so much about guns, but about mobs (and in the situation he's in, I doubt any of us would have handled it much different, except to have tried to avoid the crowd to start with).
The ending...definitely needed work.
The ending was faithful to the book (remember, Spielberg didn't write this, H.G. Wells did). It always ticks me off when screenwriters change a well-known story because they think they can write a better one, like whoever the director was that screwed up Tom Clancy's
Patriot Games.
The point of the movie is that the aliens are so far ahead of us technologically, had been planning this for hundreds of years, and took us so completely by surprise, that we were completely unable to counter the attack. What finally does them in is just something that they didn't plan for (I'm not going to say exactly what, 'cause I don't want to spoil it for the people who might actually LIKE to see it and be surprised), but it is EXACTLY how Wells ended it, and every War of the Worlds fan on the planet would be really upset if Spielberg had changed the story to a Tom-Cruise-Saves-The-World ending. Kudos to Spielberg for making it as true to the original story as any 21st-century remake of a late-19th-century story could possibly be.
As far as why the aliens are doing what they're doing--the quote from Wells' book at the beginning of the movie clues you in. Their world is dying and they have been planning to relocate to Earth for thousands of years. They didn't pull the invasion before because they weren't ready to relocate yet. As far as the spraying, I take that as they were using us as fertilizer (maybe the plants on their world need lots of iron, or even heme, judging by the color).
The whole point of this movie is to explore what a "First Contact" would be like if the alien civilization we encountered were way ahead of us, had as little compunction about wiping us out as we would over wiping out an anthill, and wanted our habitat for their own. Spielberg had already done possibly-powerful-but-completely-harmless aliens (
Close Encounters, E.T.), and this is the other side of the coin; the aliens aren't so much hostile or malevolent as completely indifferent. I personally thought it was very well done.
I doubt many mechanics had just fixed too many cars in the brief moments before the attacks began. I, too, was perplexed about the video camera. Why didn't the EMP disable it along with everything else?
