Goofs

When Dr. Forrester and Sylvia and are trapped in the farmhouse, he uses an ax to chop off the electronic eye, and the eye falls apart. However, a few seconds later, when Dr. Forrester lifts the eye, it's intact and clean again.

After the army retreat from the first major Martian attack, Forester and Sylvia are running and find a plane in which they escape. When they enter the aircraft, Sylvia is carrying a purse that she didn't have anywhere else, before or afterward, in the film.

When Sylvia first offers General Mann pastries in the Army bunker, she is wearing a blue dress with the Red Cross left arm patch. After that scene, the arm patch is never seen again on her dress.

In the farmhouse sequence, when Sylvia is cooking the eggs, the coffee pot is placed on the back left burner of the stove. When Clayton reaches for it a second later, it has moved to the right burner.

When the towns folk first go out to the first landing, Van Buren and Forrester are seen talking. The mechanic is shown walking down into the meteor slide and the towns folk are standing along the ridge, including Van Buren and Forrester. But after the mechanic hits the meteor with his shovel and then scampers back up the ridge, the two are seen walking toward the ridge line.

Forrester discovers that the meteorite is radioactive by using a Geiger counter. The rate of the counter's clicking increases when the Geiger tube is pointed at the meteorite, but Geiger tubes are not directional. While bringing the tube nearer the meteorite would increase its count range, merely changing the direction at which it was pointed, would have no effect.

As the radio reporter records his report on a tape recorder, he says that radio doesn't work anywhere, yet the bomber's run is monitored on RADAR. RADAR uses radio to do its work. If radio doesn't work then RADAR would not work either.

A number of times the learned Dr. Forrester refers to the object that has landed as a "meteor". This is an appallingly egregious faux pas on his part, as he would surely know that once a meteor hits the ground it is called a "meteorite". Any professor who refers to the bell jar shaped shields that protect the invaders as "protective blisters" would never make so careless an error...

When Dr. Forrester and Sylvia meet and talk for the first time, he is wearing red glasses. During the over the shoulder shot in Sylvia's direction it is obvious that there is plain glass in Forrester's frames, as the background and people passing behind the glasses are not distorted as they would have by an optical lens.

When the US forces first deploy against the invaders, an officer in the command post instructs a unit to deploy on Hill 3. When the military refers to a hill by number, they are referring to a hill by its height. Hill 3, therefore, would be three meters tall which wouldn't even qualify it to be a hill.

Modern viewers often complain that the wires used to suspend the Martian war machines are plainly visible throughout the film. The film was originally shot in three strip Technicolor, with prints made using a dye transfer process that resulted in very saturated colors, but with a slight reduction in overall resolution. This reduction in resolution "fuzzed out" the wires in original prints, making them effectively invisible. Later prints were made in Eastman Color, which uses a photographic process and yields sharper prints, but here had the side effect of making the support and electric wires plainly visible - the models had electrical wires as the side pods of the machines really lit up green and the "cobra heads" lit up as well. It is common practice in the film industry to take into account what details will be visible when a print is projected so as not to waste production time and money on details that will never actually be visible to a viewing audience, especially in the areas of effects and matte paintings. Thus, the filmmakers never thought the wires would be visible and in fact they weren't until the first Eastman Color prints of the film were struck in the late 1960s, and they had become even more visible on modern video releases as there is no dye sublimation resolution loss when making video masters from the original negatives. In the 2018 restoration this was resolved using digital technology.

The reporter records a description of the events on magnetic tape, even though we know that the heat ray generates a magnetic field that would destroy the recording. But there's no reason to believe the reporter knew this, and no evidence that the tapes are ever played back.

(at around 24 mins) A news reporter is describing what he's seeing as he looks in the distance at the site of the alien "meteor." Suddenly there's a bright green light, obviously from the aliens, but the actor (evidently as a reflex) looks up and to his left in the direction of the off-camera light source, and then quickly back to the aliens.

Just before the atomic bomb explodes, one of the extras on the left hand side of the screen does not have any goggles to put on, so he makes a pair with his hands.

In one brief shot, objects and trees are shown being blown around and over by the wind from the atomic bomb blast, but trees in the near distance are not affected.

The Martian camera's lights die just before Forrester actually hits it.

When Uncle Matthew is approaching the Martian war machines and preaching scripture, the blue screen effect is just barely reflected in his hair.

The telephone had stopped working because the Martian machine had knocked down the power/phone lines, not due to magnetism. While it is indeed true that "the phone and electricity are separate wires", both types of cables are right near each other on the same utility-poles, and so the Martians' heat-rays would presumably have destroyed both sets of wires, as well.

When the forest ranger first meets up with the scientists at their fishing campsite, he grabs a cigarette from the pack in one of their pockets. One of the other scientists then asks if he wants a light for the cigarette. The forest ranger says he will "smoke it later" and goes to place the cigarette over his ear for later, but he misses and the cigarette falls to the ground before a cut to the next scene.

When the narrator is describing the fight the British put up against the Martians, the brief shot of London looks more like an scene from the 1920s than the 1950s, when the story takes place.

When the first plane drops flares into the gully, the Martians attack it with their heat rays, then the heat rays rotate around to where the military and the people are. Objects, such as bushes and cars and military vehicles catch on fire, but not one person nor their clothing does while in the same vicinity.

By the 1950's the strategy of using the air force initially before employing ground forces had been the standard US military tactic for many years and even before WW2 in some cases - yet in this movie in order to defend a remote and open part of California ground forces are deployed first and the air force sent in afterwards.

The Northrop YB-49 "Flying Wing" is shown carrying an atom bomb to destroy the Martians. This movie was made in 1953, two years after the last YB-49 made its final flight (April 26, 1951). The aircraft was ordered to be scrapped December 1, 1953.

The sound and the flash from the atomic bomb explosion arrive at the bunker at the same time. The sound should have arrived several seconds after the light.

During the riot scenes, Dr. Forester's comments when he's pulled from the truck are dubbed over.

There is a short scene of a room full of people listening to a radio broadcast of the reporter interviewing Professor McPherson at the scene of the meteorite. But the visual portion of the scene is in slow motion, as can be seen by the people moving in the background.

When the atomic bomb mushroom cloud rises into the sky, at the bottom of the screen is a thick dark line which is the pyrotechnic platform used to generate the smoke for the rising cloud.

When wild horses are running down a steep embankment, in the final seconds of the scene you can see men on horseback following the wild horses, raising their arms and causing the horses to stampede.

When the Martians are destroying the city, a blue-screen process can be seen reflecting off the War Machines.

When Clayton's plane crashes, a rope can be seen pulling the tail of the plane to the side.

After the atomic bomb is dropped on the Martians, the pressure wave hits the observers and begins throwing unsecured objects around. Look toward the bottom left of the screen and a mattress can be seen flying away; it was intended for a stuntman to fall on when he is "blown" off the top of a truck. The stuntman does make the fall, though, just a second or so after the mattress blows away.

General Mann tells the scientists that the only hope for humanity is whatever the scientists can develop then sends them off on their own with no protection. Any military man would send an armed escort to protect the people who are the last hope for all of humanity.

All electronic communication is supposed to be down forcing information to be sent by jets, but the men in the map room are wearing headsets and continuously updating positions from all over the world in real time as though they are receiving radio communications.

If the rioters are grabbing vehicles to escape the city then there should not be overturned vandalized cars and trucks strewn around the city, the rioters would have driven them away.

The radio reporter records his final lines into his tape recorder. Sylvia and Clayton comment to each other on what the reporter has just said. Yet they are 30 to 40 feet away from the reporter, and nowhere near him. Additionally, there is a lot of hustle and bustle going on between where Clayton, Sylvia and the reporter are standing, so they should not have been able to hear what the reporter said.

There is Martian blood on Sylvia's scarf, but the Martin was several feet away when it was by the axe, far too much for blood spatter.

When the scientists are about to project an image using the Martian lens, there are two separate shadows from the boom and mike. As soon as the projector screen is pulled down there is a shadow from the boom that goes across the entire screen. At that same moment, the shadow from the mike can be seen on the wall to the left of the projector screen.

The narrator incorrectly pointed out that Jupiter is a rocky molten lava planet with extremely high atmospheric pressure. What he was actually describing was the characteristics of the planet Venus - Jupiter has no surface. Also, Mars' nearest neighbor is actually Earth, not Jupiter.

When being interviewed by a radio newsman, Gene Barry (Dr. Forrester) pronounces "gyroscopic" with a hard "g" which no scientist of note would have done.

When General Mann appears at the base, the Colonel first refers to him as "Colonel".

One of the reporters refers to a Martian attack on Rangoon, India. Rangoon (now Yangon) is in Burma (now Myanmar), and while Myanmar had been governed as part of India under the British Raj, it achieved independence in 1948.