This may have already been discussed. But what I don’t get is the huge crowd surrounding that crater from the lightning. Then the machine shoots out of the crater and… they step back an inch! They just watch the thing explode out of the ground like “oh, nothing’s bad is gonna happen”.
And when the buildings explode in that scene the crowd moves like 5 feet to the side… until a building next to it explodes. and this drags on forever!! JUST RUN, FOOLS, RUN!
It depends on how deeply they were buried, its only in a very few places that we’ve done much more than scratch the surface, most digging work would go down for a few hundred metres at the maximum.
He did, at least we were spared that potential happy ending. 
Oh, and I, too, miss seeing the duel between a tripod and HMS (or I guess it would be USS) *Thunderchild * off the coast. That’d be 'way cool.
Better yet, the USS Abraham Lincoln and all her attendant ships and subs. Maybe even throw in the USS Missouri. With all the F-16, TLAMS and 2000lb shells flying around, that could have been awesome.
Damn, now I suppose I will have to read the book.